Miami-Yoder School gets excellent rating with new security devices from the company American Dynamics.
by American Dynamics
Highway 94, which runs in a straight line between Colorado Springs to the west and Kansas to the east, is about the only thing that breaks with the landscape of lush green alfalfa fields and cattle ranches here in eastern Colorado. The town of Rush is one of the unincorporated villages that dot the highway, and home to fewer than 750 inhabitants.
Located 40 miles east of Colorado Springs (the second most populous city in the state, sitting at the base of the iconic Pikes Peak in the Rocky Mountains), Rush is home to the only school building in the Miami-Yoder School District, which for years had to face many problems related to its remote location and the poor conditions of its facilities. The district, which provides coverage to a 500-square-mile area of three counties in this rural Colorado area, was spending a significant percentage of its budget busing students to other areas to provide them with services not available at the school, due to complicated facilities, location and budget constraints.
Challenges
The Miami-Yoder school, which serves the academic needs of students from pre-kindergarten through high school, needed new facilities to solve considerable safety issues. Specifically, the district needed a building with fewer accessible entry and exit points than those existing in its current facilities, which consist of a main building almost 100 years old and a series of mobile classrooms, some of which were from the 70s, full of leaks in the roofs and sunken floors. Not only were the mobile classrooms cramped and run-down, but students were also frequently asked to leave the buildings and walk around the campus, which bordered a huge cattle ranch, to take their next class.
On one occasion, the school had to be closed due to a threat of shooting by a high school senior, who was not allowed to graduate. Due to the number of mobile classrooms and the fragmented nature of the school campus, it took security forces more than two hours to vacate the school buildings and grounds. Also, due to the remote location of the school, it took nearly 45 minutes for the SWAT unit to reach the school site from El Paso County.
"That event caused us great concern because of our location," said Rick Walter, miami-Yoder school district principal. "In the event of an incident it is very difficult for law enforcement to respond and we needed to implement our own processes to ensure the safety of the students until their arrival."
The construction of a new facility for Miami-Yoder would ensure administrative staff use of technology that would allow school officials to control the building and have access to video footage of incidents at the time of their occurrence. Administrators also wanted the security system to help manage the student population, control student and staff access to certain areas, use the system as a deterrent to avoid potential incidents such as vandalism and minor assaults, as well as assist in investigative or evidentiary processes in the event of an incident occurring on the school grounds.
Solution
Thanks to Colorado's Build Schools of Excellence Today (BEST) program, designed to help school districts improve old, run-down facilities, the town of Rush is now home to one of the newest and most technologically advanced educational facilities in the state. Subsidized with $18.1 million in financial support from the BEST program, the new Miami-Yoder school features a 91,000-square-foot building comprised of new construction and renovated spaces, several new classrooms for the school's nearly 300 students (from pre-kindergarten through grade 12), a new, remodeled gymnasium, as well as new spaces for special education. music, art and vocational instruction in welding, carpentry and agricultural mechanics.
The school also features state-of-the-art solar-powered geothermal heating and air conditioning systems, as well as other technological equipment such as interactive dashboards and computer labs that serve as backup pedagogical tools. The building is also one of the first schools in the state to be equipped with wireless internet.
Despite all these improvements, school administrators consider Tyco Security Products' new access control, intrusion detection and surveillance system, designed and installed by Denver-based integrator Secure All Solutions, to be perhaps the most important of the school's technological improvements. For the first time, thanks to the use of an Access Control Platform Entrapass Corporate Edition from Kantech, it is possible to automatically control access in the 11 doors of the building, including three main entrances to the pavilions of the primary and secondary school, one towards the main administrative offices, and several interior doors that separate different areas of the school.
"Being able to finally control access to the entrances and exits of our facilities was really one of the main reasons for our construction," Walter said. "This not only restricts access through the exterior doors, but limits the amount of traffic that circulates through the corridors within our building and between the different areas of our school."
Teachers of vocational courses, for example, will have access to the school's new 1,900-square-foot wing and its welding and metallurgy workshops, carpentry and nursery; and one of the school's five computer labs, but not the primary school area. In addition, facility staff and certain administrators will be the only ones authorized to enter the school's physical plant, where the new underground pumps for heating and air conditioning are located, which along with the photovoltaic arrays located on the roof of the school, are expected to reduce utility expenses to less than US$1 per square foot.
"Considering that this is a small, rural school, they could have implemented a simple access control system that was not integrated with an intrusion detection system or video surveillance," said John Castle, president of Secure All Solutions. "In this project we were working with a tabula rasa and it soon became apparent that they wanted a kind of first-class system that would meet the safety challenges identified at the Miami-Yoder school."
Working in conjunction with Secure All project manager Cory Franklin, school officials requested that all doors be closed and secured throughout the day, except for a 20-minute period each morning when students and staff arrive. Visitors, including parents and providers, must request access using a telephone entry system at each of the three main entrances. When the building is not occupied, during the hours when there are no academic activities or on holidays, it remains protected and secured with DSC's PowerSeries intrusion detection alarm panels, also integrated into the EntraPass software.
For the first time, administrators have the ability to monitor conditions within each classroom, hallway, and other common areas such as the gym and cafeteria, as well as outdoor areas such as the parking area, employing a combination of approximately 80 analog IP cameras from American Dynamics. Two (2) American Dynamics HDVRs that process video images, both analog and IP, are integrated into the EntraPass software, which can automatically request the display to a given camera of an access control event, for example, the entry of a person through a door or someone who presents an invalid identification, Castle said. The cameras are recorded on two 32-channel HDVRs, one that processes video from the north side of the building and one from the south. The video is stored for 30 days, but the school has the possibility to increase that period to 90 days if necessary.
The cameras focus on student behavior in the classroom and not on teacher performance, in accordance with Colorado regulations. Video footage has already helped resolve several incidents, including minor incidents of vandalism, theft of school bag items, disputes between teachers and students and was a pivotal tool in an expulsion hearing.
School officials can also view video, access events, as well as report and manage the system from their desks in the school's administrative offices or remotely using a web browser. This possibility of remote access, using Kantech's remote client, also allows law enforcement to manage in real time and use surveillance functions. Thus, the authorities can have access to the system both from a central distribution location and from their patrols, with the possibility of completely confining the school if necessary.
This remote access also represents advantages for system maintenance. "If there's a problem we can diagnose more than 85 percent of that system from our offices more than two hours away," Castle said.
"The primary goal of the BEST program was to improve safety and security, which was just what we were looking for," Walter said. "What's even better, with our new safety and environmental systems we don't have to go out into the snow and risk falls."
Miami-Yoder, one of the first new schools to go online using the BEST grant, celebrated its achievement with a grand opening ceremony featuring several local and state officials and a series of essays prepared by students on the occasion of the event. The writings highlighted the renewed sense of security students had at the school and their appreciation for the new technology that was at their disposal.
Employing the strategy of using state-of-the-art technology to improve safety and security conditions and significantly reduce ongoing operating costs, Miami-Yoder School achieved the district's achievements of becoming a safe and secure environment for students, employees, and the neighboring community. Now the residents of the village of Rush have an emblem of their own.
