Westlake students working on security app for local law agencies

WESTLAKE, Texas - Westlake High School students are getting to present their Business Incubator Class projects on pitch night.

What they're saying:

Students have been working all school year working on a business concept as a team.

"They start by ideating and identifying problems to solve, then they do a competitive analysis, they do customer interviews. We create a full financial model," says Jeff Nixon, CTE business incubator teacher at Westlake High School.

The backstory:

There are multiple teams in the class and the students have come up with a variety of products.

The group leading the LiveEyes company decided to create an app that will help law enforcement in the event of a school emergency.

"We decided to kind of get involved in this area, because we are students at these schools and it's very prevalent that there's a lot of school shootings nowadays. We're really concerned with the safety of our fellow peers and ourselves," says Westlake High School junior, Allie Kahn.

"Our product is simply just a software system that integrates into cameras that gives law enforcement the ability to connect and be able have eyes on in a situation where there be an emergency or active school shooter and track them actively and potentially save lives," says Westlake High School junior, Ian Dumitrescu.

As part of the assignment, students work with mentors in that field. And who knows best about school safety than your very own school police officer.

"It's been really good for me to just learn how to talk to adults and get more comfortable with it because that is something that I have to do in the real world for job applications all that kind of stuff," says Westlake High School junior, Jesse Ramos.

Why you should care:

The LiveEyes group hopes that this will help officers resolve emergency situations. Eanes ISD officer Oborski says under HB 3 every campus in the state is required to have an officer on campus. But in the case of an emergency where the school district needs assistance, this app will help assisting local law agencies.

"This school is almost 570,000 square feet. So having any information as far as location of a suspect can severely, you know, help our responding officers and our partners that are going to be coming from all other agencies isolate and kind of locate where that suspect is and really shorten the response time to be able to end that threat," says Eanes ISD police officer, Kristof Oborski.

Officer Oborski says the school district conducts regular active shooter training on the school campuses to allow officers to familiarize with the school layout.

What's next:

Students will be pitching their ideas in a Shark Tank style presentation on April 30th and their group will have the opportunity to win $15,000 to take to their second-year course called Accelerator, to put those funds towards trying to get their product on the market.