Like many school districts across the country watching incidents unfold on the nightly news, the city of Manchester, Conn., has turned to video surveillance technology to help keep events under control at its own K-12 campuses. School administrators believed that deploying surveillance cameras in its schools could help its security staff quickly detect problems and apprehend instigators by visually documenting events as they unfold.

Maintaining campus safety and security at the district is challenging. The high school houses nearly 2,300 students. The sprawling campus contains an original quadrangle, two additional wings, athletic fields as well as a heliport. The remaining 5,000 or so students in the district are divided among 10 elementary schools, a middle school and an alternative school. A new video surveillance solution was needed so school administrators could keep an eye on things.

“Video cameras make great eyewitnesses,” claims Mark McKenney, senior security officer for Manchester High School. “They help us determine who, where and when. And cameras don’t lie.”

Video Helps Catch Criminals, Reduces Liability
So far, at the high school, McKenney has used the video to recover $2,000 worth of school property and prosecute thieves. In another instance, a student claimed his car was hit in the parking lot until McKenney pulled up the video showing that the dent was already there when the student drove onto school property.

Video surveillance, however, isn’t always about capturing criminal activity, contends McKenney. “One time we used the system to help a panicked student discover that the cell phone he carelessly left on the roof of his car was picked up by a friend for safekeeping.”

Prior to having video cameras on campus, without an eyewitness to an incident, investigations were protracted and drained the district’s limited security resources.

“Before the cameras were in place, if we didn’t have any witnesses to an event, we had nothing to fall back on to tell us what happened,” explains McKenney.

Manchester Chief of Police Marc Montminy explains, “The use of IP video cameras allows us to maximize our resources and reduces the need to have a physical presence in every hallway. The remote viewing capability of the high school system allows police to view internal cameras from the police station.”

District Piggy-Backs on Town Network
Back in 2004 when the district first started installing video surveillance, the Hartford suburb where the Manchester district is located had already invested in a robust fiber optic network to connect the town hall, library, schools and municipal buildings. However, it had yet to capitalize on this technology to address school security and safety.

To minimize installation costs, Manchester Public Schools adopted a network-based surveillance system that was installed directly on the district’s existing high-speed fiber optic network. There was no need for additional cabling for the cameras and video management system. This solution combined strategically placed fixed and pan/tilt/zoom network video cameras from Axis Communications and an intuitive network video recorder (NVR) from IPVideo Corp. that allows authorized users to control cameras remotely as well as view archived footage on the fly.

At the densely populated high school, the video surveillance system has enabled security to recover stolen property, provide irrefutable proof of events for disciplinary action, and quickly verify the whereabouts of students and staff in an emergency.

As an early pioneer in the adoption of network video technology, Manchester Public Schools began wide-scale deployment of video surveillance in late 2004. Eight years into continuous service, its network video recorder now manages some 175 cameras that keep watch 24×7 over the schools and four town facilities. The district processes and archives the video on an array of six multi-terabyte servers.

Because the city has a high-speed fiber optic network that connects all the buildings, authorized users can monitor and manipulate all the network cameras remotely from one central location. In this case, it’s the Kennedy Education Center, which also houses the board of education offices. Administrators at individual schools are only authorized to view and control the cameras on their own campuses.

District Soon to Adopt Megapixel Technology
As funds become available, the Manchester school district is looking to upgrade its NVR to IPVideo’s more feature-rich Sentry VMS video management system. Among the enhancements they’re looking to implement are mapping, browser-based client, advanced compression technology and motion-sensor recording to affordably extend archiving from seven to 31 days. In addition, the district is looking to support an upgrade to megapixel cameras and implement more sophisticated archival searching.

“We’d like to be able to do things like put a box around graffiti on a wall and have the VMS search the video to determine when that graffiti appeared and who put it there,” says McKenney. “It’ll be a really useful tool when someone denies they were involved. We’ll be able to quickly pull up the video record, and show them that we know they were there and we have proof they aren’t telling the truth.”

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