The security system had been in place at Apalachee High School for only about a week. Every teacher and staff member was issued an identification badge, and on it, a panic button. Push the button three times for everyday emergencies, teachers are told, and push it over and over and over again if there’s a campuswide threat.

That’s what happened Wednesday when, authorities say, a 14-year-old student brought an AR-15-style rifle into the school and began shooting. The school’s system worked as intended, multiple experts and officials said, and prevented the tragedy from being even worse.

Staff in the building pushed their buttons, alerting law enforcement officers — almost immediately — about the active shooter.

“The protocols in this school and this system activated today prevented this from being a much larger tragedy than what we had here today,” Chris Hosey, the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, told reporters Wednesday.

Experts in school security also credited the school resource officers, who — unlike in some past school shootings — rushed to the scene and quickly managed to take the suspect into custody alive. In addition, a locked classroom door apparently protected some students and may have slowed the shooter.

Still, many questions remained a day after the deadly shooting, which left two students and two teachers dead and nine others injured. They include how much attention, if any, the school directed at the suspect before Wednesday’s rampage, and whether anyone worked to prevent his actions in advance. The suspect’s aunt told The Washington Post that he had been “begging for months” for mental health help and that “the adults around him failed him.”

The 14-year-old suspect, a student at the school, was charged with four counts of murder.

One intervention that appears to have mitigated the carnage is the CrisisAlert System made by an Atlanta-based company called Centegix. It is designed to instantaneously alert law enforcement, school officials on-site and people throughout the building after a teacher or staff member pushes the button on their badge multiples times.

Mary Ford, a spokeswoman for the company, said the system costs an average of $8,000 per school, per year, and is designed to send alerts for everyday emergencies as well as school shootings.

She said the system, first sold in 2019, is used in more than 6,000 schools. That includes 80 percent of public schools in Georgia and in Nevada, as well as 35 percent of public schools in Florida, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent in New Mexico, the company said.

All teachers and staff are issued a wearable badge with an embedded button. In the case of a campuswide threat, staff are told to continue pushing the button until they see messages that the school is on lockdown.

If the button is pushed eight times in a row, a message is sent to the local 911 system as well as others in the building. It also triggers audio messages over a public announcement system, lockdown warnings on smart boards and laptops, and flashing strobe lights around the building.

Jennifer Sanders, a high school teacher in nearby Gwinnett County whose daughter attends Apalachee High School, said the system is also in use in her district.

“We prepare for this, we train for this,” she said. “We all have buttons on our ID cards that we can press and put in a hard lockdown. I think that all the steps and measures that they’ve taken have really helped. The response time was fantastic.”

Almost as soon as the shooting began on Wednesday, school staff pressed their buttons, The Post reported. Two school resource officers quickly arrived, confronting the suspect and forcing him to surrender.

Without this system and fast action by the resource officers, more people would probably have died, said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.

“They did what they were supposed to do, when the shots were fired … they went directly to the threat, confronted the shooter and ended it,” Canady said.

A nonprofit group, Make Our Schools Safe, has been lobbying states to adopt Alyssa’s Law — legislation that requires schools to install panic alarm systems. The legislation — named for Alyssa Alhadeff, who died at age 14 in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. — has passed in seven states, said Alhadeff’s mother, Lori, who leads the nonprofit.

Alhadeff said in an interview that she takes solace from the school’s panic system seemingly reducing the death toll, she said.

“Every time this works,” Alhadeff said, “I feel Alyssa is saving lives.”

Still, panic systems cannot by themselves ensure safety, Canady said. One drawback is that panic buttons raise the possibility of a prankster activating the devices to spread a false alarm, he said. And, before purchasing technological “enhancements” like panic buttons, schools must ensure they have basic defenses set up first: for example, locking down all perimeter doors to prevent anyone getting in without approval.

In Georgia, the panic systems are not mandated, but schools are required by law to conduct intruder alert drills by Oct. 1 each school year. The law, known as the Safe Schools Act, also requires schools to maintain school safety plans and submit them to the state emergency management agency for approval. Parents are allowed to opt their children out from the drills under the law.

In Barrow County, the school board heard a pitch last September for the Centegix alert system.

A five-year contract to implement the alert buttons in all 17 schools, plus other school district buildings, was priced at about $1 million, staff said, with about $800,000 of that coming from a state school security grant.

The remaining $200,000, school officials said, was to be funded by a speed camera ticketing fund from the sheriff’s office. The school board unanimously approved the plan last October, according to minutes of the meeting.

The alert system worked and the school resource officers performed well, said Tom Czyz, a school security consultant who often travels to the sites of school shootings. He was on-site in Georgia on Thursday.

He added that a key safety measure was the locked door to the suspect’s classroom that prevented him from getting in. A student told CNN that the classroom door automatically locked behind the suspect after he left their algebra class. When he knocked to be let back in, she said, another student went to let him in but then backed away instead of opening the door.

“This slowed him down,” Czyz said, and saved lives.

But none of that stopped the suspect getting into the school with the gun. Czyz said schools should consider gun detection systems that use cameras or metal detectors to alert if a weapon is in the building.

“He should not be able to get an AR-15 into a high school,” he said.

But other experts said the answer to the question of how to stop school shootings will never be found in technology.

“Whenever a tragedy like this occurs, parents are looking for answers and school officials are looking for anything they can point to reassure parents they are doing everything they can to prevent the next tragedy,” said James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minn., who studies school shootings.

But much of this is “security theater,” he said — meant to make people feel better. Prevention, he said, requires investing in time and space for teachers to develop relationships with troubled students, which can lead to noticing problems and helping avert them.

“It feels very squishy,” he said. “The reality is it’s the intangible stuff that actually gets the job done.”