Upgrading school security with the Drako Smart Video Security Grant

Parents, teachers, and administrators know that schools are in a quandary, amid increasingly visible security threats, including serious violence. With limited budgets, decisions have to be made based on best guesses about what problems will actually emerge. Hire more guards or increase police presence? Invest in new cameras? Focus only on preventative training?

Every school wants to protect students and other members of the school community from theft, violence, and unpredictable safety hazards. But there are compelling arguments for a wide range of security measures — and the budget spent on one area can’t be spent on another, no matter how vital each one seems.

There’s no area of the school that doesn’t deserve a high level of protection, either, and every part of your physical plan brings its own challenges for camera coverage, mounts, and more.

To make these decisions slightly easier, the Drako Smart Video Surveillance Grant offers selected educational institutions financial assistance to implement the AI-driven, cloud-native video surveillance that makes the most sense today: the Eagle Eye Cloud VMS.  

Eagle Eye Networks takes a comprehensive approach to security, which means your security system does more than record events for review long after the fact. Four elements that Eagle Eye offers are especially relevant to schools: 

Vape Detection: With Eagle Eye Sensor integration, the Eagle Eye Cloud VMS can help intervene quickly when vaping is detected on your campus, without violating student privacy. Rather than relying solely on video camera input, vape detection uses wireless sensors to detect vaping byproducts in the air and then sends alerts to authorities. 

Eagle Eye Gun Detection: If a gun is on your campus, you want to know. With Eagle Eye Gun Detection, any time a gun is brandished in sight of an enrolled camera, you get an alert. And that alert is based on careful, multi-layer confirmation. Both local (edge) AI and cloud-based AI are used to spot firearms, and human experts evaluate the footage within seconds to head off false alarms. The result is a gun detection system that covers more than a human guard could — and is drastically more accurate than AI alone. 

Eagle Eye 911 Camera Sharing: If an emergency occurs on school grounds, you want to be able to give emergency responders as much information from the scene as possible — but you also want every person to quickly reach safety, not stay near a source of danger simply to provide updates. With 911 Camera Sharing, if an emergency call occurs nearby, your designated security cameras can be used to update first responder organizations by giving emergency operators temporary, secure access. That gives a stream of actionable, visual information, helping emergency personnel know what is (or isn’t) happening. 

Eagle Eye License Plate Recognition (LPR): Students, teachers, and other school personnel typically arrive or are dropped off by car; students are dropped off and picked up by car. License plate recognition helps you manage vehicle traffic and match vehicles to people, so you can essentially use license plates as mobile parking or entry credentials, or set up alerts when hotlisted vehicles are spotted. 

Perhaps best of all for schools, Eagle Eye surveillance is based on an affordable subscription model, rather than budget-disrupting large capital expenditures.  

If your school is facing the kind of budget crunch that makes selecting the best security more difficult than it should be, please consider applying for the Drako Smart Video Security Grant.

Timothy Lord

Timothy Lord has witnessed and written about IT security trends and the ongoing evolution of SaaS for more than 25 years.