School Video Surveillance Case Study – Fairfield Community Schools

Fairfield Community School District – Using Cloud Video Surveillance to Create a Safer Environment on Four School Campuses

– Andrew England, Technology Director, Fairfield Community School District

The Fairfield Community School District has three elementary school campuses and a fourth campus with a junior high and high school. We have approximately 2100 students. Our district’s top priority for our security camera system is to protect our students, staff and property.

Security Camera Goals and Physical Layout

In the event of any situation, we want our school staff and first responders to have as much information as possible. So we’ve designed our surveillance system to thoroughly cover all the areas below.

• Exits and Entrances. We will cover every entrance and exit to all buildings

• We will be able to see the full lengths in the hallway, including entrances to all the classrooms.

• Indoor Gymnasiums and Lunchrooms. These are larger spaces to monitor, and they each have their own entrances and exits.

• Outside parking lots, playgrounds, shipping and receiving.

To achieve such a comprehensive level of situational awareness we will have 138 cameras, 76 to cover the three elementary schools and 62 for the combined junior high and high school campus.

Cloud-based Video Surveillance Factors

We knew we wanted a cloud-based security camera system for all schools in our district, based primarily on the following factors:

1. Better mobile access and sharing with law enforcement. As part of my state grant application for partial funding of this system, I made it clear it was a top priority to be able to give law enforcement easy access. We wanted a cloud-based system, so we could provide that remote video access while keeping our network protected.
2. Off-site cloud video storage with built in redundancies. This will save our district the expense of providing local storage and disaster recovery, plus the cloud system eliminates the large IT management overhead.
3. Video retention flexibility. We did not want to be locked into a fixed storage allotment. We wanted to be able to easily modify our total storage capacity as we needed, including allotting longer or shorter storage periods for each individual camera.

Eagle Eye Networks Security Camera Video Management System

We ultimately selected Eagle Eye Networks as our cloud video surveillance provider. Below are their biggest strengths as they relate to our district’s requirements:

1. First Responder Emergency Video. The cloud-based Eagle Eye Security Camera VMS well exceeded our requirements for access by law enforcement.
   • The Eagle Eye Security Camera VMS will allow us to designated groups of cameras, and then assign granular permissions for accessing the video from specific camera groups. For example, we can designate: “High school entrance and exits”, “Junior High Hallways” according to those groups.
   • Eagle Eye Networks “First Responder Emergency Video” lets us pre-designate our first responders, such as county sheriff and local police, or even our local fire department, who then download the mobile app so they can to instantly view our schools’ video during an emergency.I like that we have control where we have the option to only allow access if a situation arises, and to keep it private until we turn on the emergency activation.Once we activate the alert, the Eagle Eye VMS immediately sends an email to our entire list of responders. The first responders can then view video from a web browser or the Eagle Eye Viewer mobile apps.If we designate a specific camera, the emails will include direct links to those cameras.
2. Low Management and support. Because the Eagle Eye VMS is a cloud-based surveillance system, our staff doesn’t have to support the IT aspects of the system management, such as routing configuration, and on-premise storage redundancies. This keeps us from being spread too thin.
3. Cyber-security/Network Protection. We are impressed with Eagle Eye Networks’ focus on keeping their security camera system cyber secure. We can let authorized personnel access the videos – without opening up our network.
4. When I did my standard due diligence on their company, one of the things that struck me was Eagle Eye Networks’ founder and CEO Dean Drako. Dean is also the founder and former CEO of Barracuda Networks, which is a public company in the cloud and IT security space. So cloud and cyber security areas where he has both expertise and a successful track record.

Eagle Eye Networks’ VMS has a lot of features, but not a big learning curve. It has similar alerts as I expect from cloud systems to keep me on top of the system status, such as if a camera isn’t working down, or the internet is down. It looks easy to add cameras.   And because it’s cloud-based, it is automatically fully integrated and centrally managed across all our campuses.

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