School safety has perhaps never been more important than in 2019. Always on the minds of parents, students, faculty, and staff, educational facilities cannot afford to ignore potential security risks and challenges.
School safety has perhaps never been more important than in 2019. Always on the minds of parents, students, faculty, and staff, educational facilities cannot afford to ignore potential security risks and challenges. Decision-makers require cost-effective, intuitive, and versatile
video surveillance solutions to ensure both the safety of people and the
security of campus facilities.
Pelco provides video management solutions and video surveillance cameras for a range of industries, including educational facilities, universities, colleges, alongside primary and secondary schools. Our IP video surveillance solutions integrate with a range of systems and analog cameras to bring an affordable, functional VMS for schools.
Eaton High School, a high school in Colorado, utilized security cameras and VMS to their advantage. They found that video surveillance benefits school campuses in myriad ways — many of which they did not anticipate!
They implemented 50 cameras on campus, with 75% of them being internal and the rest set up externally. “All of our hallways, our library, any place you are going to have student flow, there is going to be a camera internally. Student parking is covered. Staff parking is covered. We have a 360 camera in our commons area, which is where the kids eat,” said Kauffman, the assistant principal at Eaton High School.
Deterrent for vandalism
Kauffman says that, initially, the video surveillance system was installed to provide a deterrent for inappropriate behavior, both internally and externally. “Our issue was we were dealing with a pretty high degree of vandalism and it got to be a rather expensive repair/cleanup… So I would say that our initial interests were related to some damage that was done to the buildings, and then obviously it has grown into one that we are now looking obviously at building security and keeping people out of the building that shouldn’t be here and keeping people in the building that should be here.”
Kauffman offered additional insight regarding how their VMS allowed them to more accurately distinguish between guilty and innocent parties. “The cameras do two great things for us: either prove fact, or disprove allegations.” Security camera systems not only deter vandalism, but they help accelerate the investigative process as well.
Resource management
It didn’t take long for authorities at the school to tap into the versatility of their video surveillance system. While deterring vandalism was always a priority, Kauffman and others quickly realized how effective their VMS was in monitoring potential security threats on campus, be they external or internal.
What’s more, Kauffman observed that their security camera system improves operational efficiency. The cameras afforded them the ability to minimize the resources dedicated to investigating potential security concerns. Kauffman sums this point up well; “…it does minimize the amount of leg-time, people-time, to actually investigate what happened.”
Ensuring school safety
Most importantly, Eaton High School became a significantly more secure facility, and it didn’t take long for the school to put the VMS to work. “…we went into lockdown because of a series of ominous threats to the school. And the cameras were used specifically to make certain that that individual came nowhere near the building. From that point, I’d say these things are priceless.”