Chester County honored with Jay Mitchell Graham Award for emergency-response app

Chester County received the 2024 Jay Mitchell Graham Memorial Award from the South Carolina Association of Counties for a countywide emergency-response project that began as a school-safety initiative and expanded to multiple agencies across the county.

Nut graf: The award recognizes innovation in local government; the county’s project combined interagency cooperation, mutual-aid agreements with neighboring counties and a mobile app to coordinate responses to incidents affecting schools and other county sites.

At the podium, Bill Robinson, president of the South Carolina Association of Counties, said the award recognized Chester County’s project titled "Enhancing Emergency Response: Leveraging Technology for a Coordinated Effort to Protect Schools," noting the initiative "mushroomed" from a school-focused effort to a countywide system after 10 agencies and neighboring counties joined the mutual-aid agreement. Robinson highlighted the project’s mobile app as a key innovation, saying the app allows the county to manage multiple incident types and improves situational awareness and coordination among emergency agencies.

County emergency management leadership accepted the award and credited deputy and staff leadership. In remarks included in the meeting record, the county’s emergency management official said much of the credit belongs to the deputy director who led technical implementation and operations.

Ending: Council members congratulated emergency management staff and welcomed the statewide recognition as an example other communities can follow.