Security Success Breeds Growth

Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM

Several middle and high school students recently broke into an elementary school within the Spring ISD (Independent School District) in Texas. They took several laptops and cash, and hid some items outside under the steps of the portable building. The police retrieved the video, still-framed the images with good face shots and printed them. They took the photos to the middle and high schools, where school staff quickly identified them.

“We retrieved one laptop that was still under the steps,” says Alan Bragg, chief of police at the Spring ISD Police Department. “We recovered the other two laptops from the student's residence. The parents had no idea that the equipment was stashed in their house. We filed charges and the kids served time in Juvenile Detention.”

Since that was a felony on school property, the students were expelled for the rest of the school year.

This is one of several cases that have proven a true ROI on Spring ISD's digital CCTV system installation last year. (See “On Location” in the June 2005 issue of Access Control & Security Systems, available at securitysolutions.com. This update covers system enhancements since then.)

The district, located north of Houston in an unincorporated area of Harris County, encompasses 30 school campuses, a transportation facility, football stadium, maintenance facility and administration building complex on 57 square miles of land.

“In the first phase, we installed 15 Dedicated Micros' Digital Sprite 2 DVRs across the school campuses,” Bragg says, “and another 26 units in the child nutrition area.”

The Child Nutrition Center originally installed the digital CCTV system to cover incidents such as unsafe practices, slip-and-falls, and worker's compensation claims. But since there have been several burglaries and thefts in those areas, the police department is now monitoring their units over the district's network, and it has upgraded the centers to at least one DVR and at least 16 cameras per center.

Since the first stage of installation, the department has retrofitted 14 pre-existing elementary schools, upgrading each school from 8 to 16 cameras and replacing multiple VCRs with a single Dedicated Micros DVR to monitor the perimeters, halls and buildings. It also constructed four new elementary schools, each with a minimum of 16 cameras and one DVR, and upgraded CCTV criteria for the middle schools from 32 to 50 cameras.

“We now have 70 Dedicated Micros units to monitor 26 schools — 20 elementary, four middle schools, a 9th-grade center, an academy center (which is a magnet school), the stadium complex and several support facilities such as transportation and maintenance,” Bragg says. “Half of the DVRs are the Classic model and half are NetVu Connected, but we are updating the firmware on the Classics so they can be viewed with the NetVu ObserVer software.”

Two high schools still have another system installed, but the District plans to retrofit them as well. It currently has about 330 IP digital cameras, but officials intend to replace them with analog cameras as needed.

“There may be a trend to move to IP digital cameras, but the ones we have used are very bandwidth hungry,” Bragg says. “The video was using about 200 MB of the 1GB backbone for the entire district just for video data transfer between the schools and the police department's communication center. As we added more schools, we realized that the Dedicated Micros products made it more economical to use analog instead of digital cameras.”

The school district pulled their own fiber and increased the backbone to 2GB. “As we migrated to the Dedicated Micros products and technology,” Bragg explains, “that began to free up bandwidth.”

Bragg requested more cameras for the two original high schools, but since he had already made the decision to buy analog cameras, his staff uninstalled digital cameras from a variety of schools and divided them between the two schools, increasing the number of cameras from 80 to nearly 140 per school.

A new high school, which will cover about 500,000 square feet, will have 10 Dedicated Micros DVRs to monitor 160 interior and exterior cameras. When the cameras are all installed and the newest school is completed, the police department will be monitoring more than 1,600 cameras.

Does adding all these units slow down their network? Not according to Bragg. “It doesn't seem to slow it down across the system, but it might slow down the server. The DVR isn't sending anything over the network, because we hardwired the cameras to the DVR. Bandwidth use only occurs when we access cameras to retrieve images or monitor them in real-time.”

Bragg pushed the capabilities of the system with as many as 396 images simultaneously on four 42-inch plasma monitors. “Viewing 396 cameras, the images were not flowing as smoothly as they do with fewer images, but the capability is there,” he says.

The district is currently promoting a new bond project that, if it passes, will provide an additional 13 cameras for each elementary school and upgrades to PTZ cameras in selected locations.

“The extra cameras will give school staff and parents a nice level of comfort when the police can monitor some of the hallways, especially after-hours,” Bragg says.

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

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