Located in rural Hazelhurst, Georgia, the Jeff Davis County School District operates five schools ranging from pre-K to high school, along with two administration buildings. Each school day, 3,200 students from across Jeff Davis County converge on this mile-and-a-half area.
All of the buildings have either been constructed or renovated within the last 15 years. The high school and middle school, built in 2000 and 2010, respectively, had video surveillance systems installed in an effort to provide security protection. Unfortunately, these systems were deployed using very different equipment from different vendors. The result was two entirely separate video systems consisting of a mixture of hardware.
“The two systems could not have been more dissimilar in the way they were designed and implemented. These were two completely separate systems, which just wasn’t a good thing,” said Nathan Miller, Network Engineer for the Jeff Davis County Board of Education.
The existing middle school video system used analog cameras and a hybrid solution for recording. Cameras fed footage to an encoder that transmitted the video to a VMS. That project was designed and installed by the architect and contractor when the school was constructed, but it was a less-than-ideal setup.
“From day one, it never worked properly but we were stuck with it,” Miller said.
Things were even worse at the high school, where the combination of analog cameras and outdated 16-channel analog DVRs made the recorded images virtually useless.
“The quality of the recorded video was so bad that we couldn’t identify anyone unless we knew what the child wore to school that day, and there was no reason to even try to zoom in on it,” Miller said. “So with incidents, we may have had video but we couldn’t pursue it because you really couldn’t tell what was going on. A lot of stuff was falling through the cracks.”
Given the poor video quality and coverage issues at both schools, it became obvious that both systems needed to be replaced. School administrators decided to work with the Georgia Emergency Management Agency (GEMA) to develop an improved safety strategy, and that work resulted in a plan to implement improved camera systems at every building when resources allowed. This year’s budget process included a proposal for the new systems, and it was strongly approved by voting public, putting the project into motion.
When the district reviewed its options, the use of analog cameras and systems was rejected outright; the new systems would be all IP-based. Administrators evaluated three proposed solutions in a process that included a “shootout” between three manufacturers’ cameras. This approach allowed Miller to get a feel for how the cameras would perform for four to six weeks.
At the end of the evaluation, the district chose Samsung cameras for the surveillance system upgrades. The image quality was ranked the highest of the contenders, and the robust, vandal-resistant construction of Samsung’s cameras as compared to other vendors’ offerings clinched the decision.
“Although the specs of all three cameras looked similar on paper, the actual image quality was not similar at all; Samsung images were best, with one alternative that was close. Of these two, the actual physical build quality of the Samsung was clearly a more robust construction suitable for putting in the schools,” Miller said. “When you pick up a real Swingline stapler, you know you’ve got a good stapler, and when you pick up a Samsung camera, you know you’ve got a good camera.”
For the recording and video management systems, the district chose exacqVision servers and video management system (VMS) software. The combination of the Samsung cameras with the exacqVision video recording solution gave the district the image quality and ease-of-use they were looking for, and supported the access hierarchy they required.
Progressive Communications Inc., based in Macon, Georgia, was contracted to design and install surveillance systems at all five main school locations. Russell Waggoner, Progressive Communications’ VP of Operations, served as the primary project manager and collaborated on the design with Nathan Miller from the Jeff Davis County School District.
To meet the coverage priorities within the budget for the project, Progressive Communications used three Samsung camera models: SNV-6012 cameras for indoor use; SNV-6084R cameras used both indoors and outdoors; and SNO-7082R cameras used outdoors. “We have very close to 100 percent coverage in the hallways and exteriors of the buildings, especially parking lots, the entrance to the campus, building entrances and general exterior views,” Miller said. “These priorities were identified in our GEMA safety plans, so they were the first project installation priorities too.”
The district is also moving ahead to implement coverage for the next priorities, including the extensive athletic facilities.
“We already had network connectivity at the football stadium, so we have coverage of pretty much the whole facility. We plan to add cameras to cover the baseball and softball facility when data connectivity is added later this summer,” Miller said.
Since the system’s deployment, far fewer incidents are falling through the cracks. Thanks to the high-resolution imaging provided by the Samsung cameras, the district has been able to resolve a much higher percentage of incidents than in the past. Additionally, overall student behavior has improved with the known presence of the cameras. “Some of the things that we have caught we would never have caught before,” said Miller.
Each school monitors its own cameras locally in accordance with the access hierarchy system design, and video from all sites can be accessed from the Superintendent’s or Director’s office as needed. If an incident needs to be escalated to law enforcement, the district can provide clear, usable footage right away. All these functions are supported by the exacqVision VMS software and network video recorders.
“If law enforcement needs video pulled, we can send it over to them pretty quickly, which we could never have done with the old system,” Miller said.
While the Jeff Davis County School District has been happy with its new surveillance system, parents may also be upbeat with the upgrade.
“When parents send their children to school, they expect and demand that they will be safe, so it’s our duty to provide a secure environment. That means using the best of the best in terms of technology, and the Samsung cameras certainly fit that bill,” Miller said. “These cameras have exceeded our expectations, so parents can be confident that their children are safe at school.”
