School District educates more than 2,500 students. The district has four facilities: Penn Kidder Campus, Lawrence B. Morris School, Jim Thorpe Area High School, and the administration building. The Jim Thorpe Area School District has a commitment to provide faculty, staff, students and parents with a safe academic environment.The district's old DVR system had become too cumbersome to operate and was not user-friendly for administrators to use. Issues continued to rise to the point where IT staff members were no longer able to locate video.
With the increasing demand for an improved surveillance system, Jim Thorpe Area School District determined enhancing the security system was vital to school safety; therefore, it was time for a district-wide upgrade.Joe Brown, Director of Technology and Information Services, is responsible for overseeing the school district's security system. He researched several video surveillance solutions and then consulted the expertise of Sage Technology Solutions, a local surveillance system integrator, to recommend a scalable, cost-efficient security solution.Sage Technology Solutions integrator, Dave Damron, installed an exacqVision hybrid server demo unit at the school district. After testing the exacqVision system and VMS software for several weeks, Jim Thorpe Area School District's IT department was so impressed with its ease of operation that they decided to purchase three exacqVision A-Series hybrid servers equipped with exacqVision Professional video management system (VMS) software, one for each building in the school district. Additionally, Sage Technology Solutions installed new IQinVision IP cameras in the hallways and other high traffic areas in each school building.
The new exacqVision hybrid servers allowed the school district to maintain and leverage their existing infrastructure and utilize their 95 pre-existing analog cameras to create an inexpensive, improved surveillance solution. exacqVision A-Series hybrid servers increased the storage capacity in each building to up to two terabytes. The scalable system allows each school building to add cameras as needed.
One of the main reasons Jim Thorpe Area Schools selected exacqVision Professional VMS software was for its ability to run on Macintosh computers. The principal and assistant principal of each building and Director of Building & Grounds operate the exacqVision Professional VMS client software through their Mac computers on a daily basis. With exacqVision Professional VMS, they can better monitor the cafeteria, restrooms, playground, building entrances, gymnasium, stairways and hallways in each building. Additionally, exacqVision Professional VMS enables the Director of Building & Grounds to grant the local police department access to view and use the VMS software in the event of an emergency. Local police officers can view the cameras on the laptops within their vehicles, which has greatly improved efficiency, convenience and response time in emergency situations.
Over the past year, administrators have had significant success with utilizing the surveillance system to deal with unruly students and respond to situations quickly. When a teacher reports an incident within the building, the school administrator can search the exacqVision Professional VMS software to investigate the incident further. Administrators retrieve clips of the incident, export to a DVD or USB drive or email the file to share the footage with specific teachers, staff members or police officers. The video evidence is used in determining punishment for the appropriate students.
Another reason Jim Thorpe Area School District selected exacqVision VMS software was its ease of use for day-to-day operation. Because exacqVision VMS software was easy to learn and manage, each building principal can view and search the software without any assistance. At last year's graduation, an incident occurred with a student causing a disruption. The high school principal was able to search the VMS immediately following the graduation and discover what happened without the help of district IT staff members. The principal exported the video and sent it to police, which was later used in the court hearing. The ability of each user to easily export video has proven to be very useful.
With many after school hours activities taking place at the building, the principal and assistant principal can connect remotely via the web server and included exacq mobile app on their iPhones to view and search video from any camera on the system. This enables them to be aware of student's activity on school grounds at all times. A recent crisis situation occurred after school hours. A man broke into the building and into the vending machines. Principals monitored the situation from their iPads. They were able to zoom in to identify the suspect and use the video clip to bring charges.
The simplicity of the software made exacqVision the ideal solution for the Jim Thorpe Area School District. The building principals and Director of Building & Grounds have used the software extensively and relied on the exacqVision surveillance system tremendously to minimize theft, vandalism and violence and resolve issues between students at lunch, recess or in the classroom. Meanwhile, the exacqVision system makes future expansion easy, as they plan to add more cameras in their Administration building.