CAMERAS IN THE HEARTLAND

Jul 1, 2002 12:00 PM

Teenagers have a lot to think about — grades, dates, after-school jobs — so it's not surprising that security at school is seldom on their minds. But thanks to a new CCTV system, the 1,100 students at Central High School in Salem, Wis., are covered.

With the help of the U.S. Department of Justice, funding for the $300,000 system was devoted to two schools in rural Kenosha County, Wis. — Central High School and a high school in nearby Wilmot — and was provided by a grant through the Community Orientated Policing Services (COPS) in Schools program.

The grant paid to install a system of cameras throughout Central High School to monitor activities within designated areas, inside and outside the building, including the parking lots and the sports fields. Images from the cameras are distributed to desktop computers throughout the school, storing the images for up to 30 days.

A total of 44 Panasonic video cameras monitor school activities within the halls and assembly areas such as the cafeteria and the library. Pan/tilt/zoom (PTZ)-mounted cameras provide surveillance of the larger indoor areas and of the parking lot and football field outside. Out of respect for the privacy of students and teachers, no cameras are in the classrooms.

Both school administrators and local law enforcement officials can keep watch on all of this visual information with the help of the system provided by Vision Controls Corp., Hartland, Wis. At any time during the day, video scenes can be accessed from desktop computers in the offices of school technology director Deanna Patzer, assistant principals Scott Kennow and David Munoz, and school resource officer Eric Klinkhammer. The system has made their jobs easier and enables school officials to respond quickly to incidents.

For Klinkhammer, the system does not replace his contact with the students in the hallway, but rather makes his efforts more effective. “In my position,” says Klinkhammer, “I need to be out, to know who's where and for the kids to get to know me. It's part of the reason I'm here.”

Throughout the day, the system transmits images to the Kenosha County Sheriff's Department over the Internet, enabling rapid response in the event of any violent outbreaks. Eventually, remote access will be available to the school's head custodians. Should an alarm go off in the middle of the night, a custodian will be able to check the premise before entering to prevent being surprised by an intruder. This type of communication would not be possible using a standard system, as the images would clog the lines. The heart of the current surveillance system is the Vision Controls CAM SS Digital Video Recorder (DVR). The system can display, record, archive and retrieve images from cameras in the CCTV system onto a digital workstation.

The video compression board provides 1400:1 video compression technology. Although most of the cameras do not capture every split second, the images enable analysis. Faces can be easily identified and the time and location of an incident referenced quickly from the digital information in memory. Once the approximate location of the event is found on the video, the viewer can shuttle through the scene to pinpoint the desired action. The system monitors the school around the clock, with the computers only off-line two to three minutes to reboot in the early morning.

In the event of an emergency, the system can provide information to the administration to help defuse the situation. Every classroom has a computer connected to the security system, with access limited to a select few. A total of 375 computers throughout the building provide access to the images. The system, Kennow says, “eliminates the need for me to get back to my office to access it. If I'm down at the other end of the building [for example] and something were to happen, I can lock myself down, log in and communicate with the Sheriff's office, [and] I can communicate with other classrooms in the school as well,” he says. “The system does not pin me down in a specific place in the building.” Kennow says, “In the meantime, we can sit at a location and look through the school and find out where people are. If that situation were to happen I can direct students out of classrooms to safer areas.”

Klinkhammer, the school resource officer, would be key in assisting any evacuations. The combination of radio contact and his access to the visual information throughout the school would maximize his effectiveness in the exodus of students and teachers to safer areas.

The system is also an excellent tool for day-to-day school management. Central High School has its share of student disputes, as with all schools, that can escalate into physical situations or issues related to school discipline. Investigating and mediating these episodes can be a time-consuming job for high school assistant principals. Uncovering the “he said, she said” facts behind altercations can often take hours out of the day.

Kennow recounts a recent situation: “Our head custodian allows students to leave study hall and help clean up the cafeteria. One day the students decided to skip their jobs and hang out somewhere. Instead of spending 30 minutes walking through the building, it took me about 30 seconds to find the students hanging out in a secluded hallway. Within 2-3 minutes the students were retrieved and were working again. As you can see, this saves a lot of time.”

Typically, the most difficult situations involve bringing in the parents when students raise accusations. “Last week,” Kennow recalls, “I had a parent come in who was very upset with the school for not dealing with some harassment issues. I was never informed by either party that there was a problem.” Says Kennow, “The parents alleged that the student had walked from a classroom around the corner and was being harassed by another student. Without this system I would have just had to take his word for it, trying to investigate by spending hours and hours just to find something out,” he says.

With the system in place, Kennow was able to look on the computer and find out that the student walked from his class, around the corner to his locker and left the building. “According to the video,” Kennow says, “no one even approached him. It was clear that he was playing the parent versus the school, and I could visually share that with the parent — it saved a lot of time and it saved face.”

The system enables the school to archive the footage from the 44 cameras for 30 days, and quickly find the scenes they need. The school can determine who is stealing backpacks and settle disputes on fender benders in the parking lots. As for overall discipline, Kennow points out the presence of the cameras keeps students in the classrooms and the hallways clean and free of graffiti, saving time for the custodial staff. Additionally, if any incident would turn into a legal matter, scenes on the video cannot be electronically altered or spliced to transpose the order of events — making the video admissible evidence in court.

In acquiring the system, the school checked out several technological approaches before choosing the Vision Controls system for its ability to archive, reference and transmit video images at a reasonable cost. The other part of the adoption process was community acceptance. Administrators took the time to communicate with parents and students through newsletters and direct discussions, letting them know, according to Kennow, “that this is not going to be Big Brother,” promising to provide a safer atmosphere within the school without being intrusive.

“We kept informing the students, teachers, parents and other community members that this system is not going to be used like similar systems in businesses where someone sits in front of the monitors looking for problems,” Kennow says. “While the system can act in that capacity during a crisis, this system is set up to help students resolve issues as they are reported. Nothing is more frustrating than having someone mistreat you, steal something from you, or damage your property and then not be able to hold that person accountable.”

School safety is a hot issue, and schools need to be proactive in addressing the safety of their buildings. According to Kennow, parents need to know that their children's school is safe and will provide a good environment for learning. “All the research,” he says, “says that when students don't feel safe in their environment they're not going to learn efficiently, and parents also want to know things are safe.”

Furthermore, the social issues that are part of any large community such as a school become less disruptive. “Kids will come to me and say ‘hey, something happened to my car yesterday’ or ‘so-and-so is doing this to me’ and instead of just taking one word versus the other, I can call the incident up and really nip that in the bud,” Kennow says. “We actually have a 100 percent solving ratio.”

With the help of local electronics dealer Rick Jarvis of RC Electronics, a Vision Controls dealer presented the benefits of the Vision Controls system to the school board. Once the decision to install the system was made, the school decided to have both Central and Wilmot wired during spring break. When the students got back to class, they quickly forgot the CCTV cameras were in place. “We were able to utilize one of the newest cameras on the market and the results have been phenomenal,” Kennow says. “It took all but a couple of weeks for the students and staff to forget that the cameras are present.”

Patzer, the school's technology director, is responsible for administering the system from the server room adjacent to the school library. She manages the school's 375 Dell computers, tied together through a Novell network, plus the building's telephone system. Three computers and a server are dedicated to the Vision Controls system with each computer capable of handling 16 cameras.

Patzer regards the video compression on the Vision Controls system as exceptional, and regarded the Dell machines as overkill for this application. Just 60 gigabytes of memory handles the 30 days of video footage from all the cameras. Vision Controls worked with the school's tech support company Golden Concepts, Middleton, Wis., and Patzer worked closely to bring up the video security system on the Novell network. Patzer also credits the Zenworks software on the Novell system with enhancing the overall system security.

Along with conveying information within the building and to the Sheriff's department, Patzer is working on eventually providing communications via modem to alert people at home to incidents as they occur during off hours. Although these schools are located in a rural area and have been untouched by large-scale violent episodes, they are using technology to keep the school and law enforcement ready to respond and to discourage such events from occurring. At the same time, the school administration can spend less time policing students and devote more of their energies to positive activities.

“I don't know that there's anything you could ever do to prevent an incident from happening,” says Kennow. “What this system does is it helps us to be proactive and if something does happen, we can handle it.”

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