Achieve Smarter School Security with Surveillance and Access Control

As a New York security firm specializing in k-12 and higher education, we preach the importance of smarter security in NYC and beyond. The safety of students and staff is of the utmost concern for schools, especially with the increasing number of incidents reported in the news every week.

We live in a scary world. But with an advanced security system, your school can have peace of mind that safety is always the priority. Here’s how your school can achieve better security with surveillance and access control:

Surveillance

No matter how thorough your security efforts are, you can’t always prevent violence, crime and other unfortunate incidents from occurring. But what you can prevent is wasting tons of time locating incident footage only to discover a low-quality recording that offers no help.

By upgrading to an IP-based video surveillance system, you can easily locate high-quality footage to assist investigations. Your chosen integrator should install cameras strategically around your school. Full coverage of hallways, entrances and exits, common areas and parking lots is essential.

To be proactive however, you can take surveillance a step further with a remote video monitoring service. This service uses cameras with built-in intelligent analytics to detect activity. When unusual activity is detected, the system notifies a remote station. There, a designated agent will check camera feeds to determine the best response.

A quick case study about remote video monitoring

One of our remote video monitoring clients recently had someone loitering on school grounds overnight. The system picked up on the activity and automatically alerted an agent at our remote central station.

The agent checked surveillance feeds and determined the situation to be low-risk. As a result, she chose to warn the intruder through a voice-down speaker system before anything else. Upon hearing the warning, the person left the site immediately. And if he hadn’t left, the agent would have immediately set off an alarm and notified authorities. This assured our client just how proactive the service can be.

Access control

Having the right access control system in place is one of the most reliable ways to protect a building. This is because an efficient system will prevent unauthorized guests from accessing the school, which means protection against potentially threatening individuals.

But in addition, an efficient system will ensure that students, staff and approved visitors can gain access to necessary areas at the right times with minimal barriers. This improves daily operations and speeds up the flow of traffic.

Access control should cover 1) the outside perimeter of school grounds, 2) all entrances to the building and 3) internal areas, including classrooms, hallways, corridors, stairwells and restricted areas.

Your school can use wireless locks with a centrally managed access card system that controls when and where specific users have access. For example, an administrator’s card might be able to access the building after-hours while a student’s card can only access it until 3 PM. Such a system can deploy thousands of access cards at once while easily tracking each and every time someone enters the school (or attempts to).

Learn more about your options for smarter security in NYC

Access control and surveillance can make a world’s difference for the safety and security of your school. But they are just pieces to the puzzle. It’s important to educate yourself about the best solutions for visitor management, alarms, emergencies and more. To learn about smarter security in NYC and how it can increase the effectiveness of your chosen security system, contact us today.