Brentwood Christian School – Keeping 800 students on 50 acre campus safe

– Wayne Marks, CTO, Brentwood Christian School

Brentwood Christian School is a private school with 800 students in grades PreK-12. We have six buildings on our large 50 acre campus — it’s a quarter mile from one end to the other.

Our fundamental goal for installing a security camera system is to ensure the safety of our students, staff and property. To achieve this objective, we are installing approximately 40 security cameras, to cover our campus, spanning campus entry, parking lots, playgrounds, building entrances and hallways.

We want to deploy a cloud video surveillance system as a key part of our strategy to direct our technology dollars to the classroom, rather than towards building a large technical support infrastructure. We’ve already moved our student information systems and accounting systems to the cloud with strong results and efficiencies.

Given our strategic initiatives, the cloud-based Eagle Eye Networks Security Camera VMS is a great fit. It lets us keep our technical staff limited to a small team yet still be able to properly support our network and security systems.

We did a thorough analysis regarding our security camera system operating requirements. Below is our specification.

• Camera locations provide coverage for:
  1. Campus entry – for continuous perimeter monitoring
     • Vehicle entry points
     • Foot entry points – we have an ungated campus
     • Playgrounds on the periphery
  2. Parking lots
  3. Building entry doorways
  4. Hallways, Gym, Cafeteria
• Four Surveillance level requirements:

1. Detection
   • The ability to see if an individual is in a particular area.
   • Example 1: Campus traffic monitoring – know which vehicles come on campus and a path of their rough movement across campus.
   • Example 2: We back up to a public metropolitan park. We want to know immediately if someone is approaching our school grounds from the perimeter adjacent to the park.
2.  Observation
   • Detect a person’s activity.
   • Example 1: Spot potential vandalism in the parking lot
   • Example 2: Monitoring as our students are dropped off and picked up by their parents.
3. Recognition (Known)
   • Capture video image with sufficient resolution to match a photo of known person.
   • Example: Match a door access video capture of a staff member with the photo on that staff member’s access badge.
4. Identification (Unknown)
   • Highest camera resolution – ability to ID unknown people
   • Example: Give law enforcement a video capture with sufficient resolution to positively identify a suspect.

Eagle Eye Networks meets all our technical criteria as follows:

• 100% cloud managed security camera system. As I mentioned, cloud-based systems are a very key part of our strategy. This reduces our support, as we don’t need dedicated IT experts, and we have offsite video and built-in redundancies. Additionally, we have easy access through web browsers and mobile apps.
• The Surveillance system is network independent. We actually have two separate networks on our campus, one for the school, and one for the church. The Eagle Eye VMS lets us easily integrate them so we can view them using a single web browser or mobile app.
• Cyber-secure system with simple user interface configurable set up – that doesn’t require a network engineer. My own background is that of an IT executive, not a network engineer, yet I can easily go into the user interface myself to configure and adjust our cameras. And Eagle Eye has staff assigned to keeping its system cyber secure so that our network is protected.
• Flexible retention period. We currently have set a 30 day retention period for our video recording. As we move forward, we will learn what we need and don’t need there.
  Because it’s cloud-based, we are not locked in. Instead, we can shorten the period, or even add to it without purchasing new equipment. We even have the granularity to make immediate changes to the retention period for each individual camera.
• System image quality and video streaming quality. As I mentioned earlier, we have a range of resolution requirements, and in some of our cases require high resolution.
• Video recording redundancy.

First Responder Emergency Video

Campus security is at the top of our list. So Eagle Eye Networks’ First Responder Real-time Video Access feature is extremely appealing to us.

We can use it pre-designate specific first responders for our school. If we ever have an emergency situation, we can use the Eagle Eye viewer mobile app or a web browser to give immediate real-time camera access – the camera feeds are not actually shared until we activate first responder access.

We can even specify specific cameras at the time of the alert. The first responders will get an email with a deep link to those cameras, as well as to our general system.

We expect a strong, positive response from our student’s parents with regards to the added protection this system brings. It is valuable to us that we will continue to get enhancements, automatically downloaded from the cloud.

Our relationship with the Eagle Eye team feels like a true partnership that will evolve over time as our security needs change.