“This system makes each campus safer
for students and staff. We now have
the level of visual communication we
need to resolve most problems before
they arise. When we do have incidents,
we’re able to de-escalate situations
more quickly than we could before.”
Mike Cho, Safety and Security
Coordinator, San Diego Unified School
District
The Challenge
The San Diego Unified School District’s previous video surveillance solution presented a number of problems. It required two management servers in which most settings had to be replicated between the two, which was awkward and cumbersome. Programming cameras required navigating two operating systems. Training administrators and end users on the old technology required a lot of time, as did making district-wide updates.
The Solution
Installation/design partner Proshop Group and Dotworkz designed and implemented
Milestone XProtect 6.0 to manage 1,169 cameras manufactured by
Axis,
Panasonic,
Samsung and
Sony. The installation runs on IBM and Dell servers.
The Advantages
As an organization that depends on voters’ support for bond funding, the investment in Milestone technology was made with an eye toward cost effectiveness. Milestone has paid off by dramatically reducing the amount of time required to administer the system and to train users and by reducing the vandalism that is costly to repair. It delivers further savings by reducing the number of staff required to physically monitor so many areas. According to district administrators, the system has improved conduct across the board by providing highdefinition (HD) images that make identifying and, when appropriate, charging perpetrators a much less arduous process than it was before the installation of the Milestone software.
Milestone Open Platform Meets Tough Demands
To select a video surveillance solution that best met its requirements, San Diego Unified School District worked closely with Dotworkz, a San Diego-based Milestone Network Video Recorder (NVR) partner with more than 15 years of experience producing outdoor camera protection solutions and, more recently, software-ready NVR machines in a wide array of sizes.
Proshop Group’s team with Dotworkz consulted with the school district on systems integration, putting Milestone XProtect at the heart of the deployment. Based on industry experience, the consulting team, along with Dotworkz president Will Ferris, believes that Milestone’s open platform provides the greatest value in areas most important to San Diego Unified School District. Those include scalability, the ability to incorporate new functionality and an enhanced level of safety and security for parents, students and teachers.
“Our role was simple,” says Ferris. “We helped the district in its quest for better camera and processing technology. We served as a guide, showing them the advantages of Milestone’s open platform over what’s offered by other vendors. We advised them to complete the training required to become certified in the technology. We also built the network video recorder and housings for their external cameras.”
The school district is licensed for 2,000 cameras. It currently operates 1,169 units manufactured by Axis, Bosch, IQinVision, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony. The cameras are installed at points where break-ins commonly occur and in areas where students gather. With the exception of a computer lab, cameras are not installed in classrooms. They are, however, placed strategically in the most problematic areas.
Integrating Cameras with Card Access
Pleased with the reliability and effectiveness of the Milestone-based system, Cho is planning to integrate card access functionality at locations throughout the district. By integrating with technology provided by Continental Access, Cho’s goal is for access to be granted or denied based on whether or not the photo on the person’s ID matches the image recorded by video camera at the point of entry. Currently, the comparison is made manually, but Cho expects the functionality, which would eliminate the use of invalid IDs, to be fully integrated and automated in the future.
“Milestone has given us a lot of tools,” Cho says. “We are very confident in our ability to integrate with card access technology, and much more in the future.”