Nationwide regulation reforms, such as emergency preparedness procedures and the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), are forcing school districts to reassess their approach to security and develop tactics to promote stasis in the classroom and empower faculty members.
Security company Verkada believes that school surveillance should be repositioned as a preventative tool for maintaining the safety and security of students. Their platform of proactivity has struck a chord with educators and administrators across the nation, as it emphasizes prevention, deterrence, and empowerment.
A holistic approach to in-school security and surveillance
Approaches to school surveillance systems have always relied on rapidly-depreciating technology that strains taxpayer resources and requires rigorous maintenance to adequately provide coverage. Leaning on legacy models such as DVRs and NVRs can dramatically impact the sustainability of a security system. Couple this with the unreliability of physical servers and schools are facing some glaring flaws in surveillance.
Security needs to be adaptive and scalable enough to offer a district greater flexibility during the deployment stage, and Verkada has presented a solution. Their product holds a reliance on cloud features, plug-and-play hybrid solutions, and security packages that can handle multiple buildings, facilities, and user profiles. These devices are regularly updated to ensure they are compliant with security protocols and operating the latest firmware. As such, these systems and their capabilities grow over time, affording administrators more granular access to what’s being monitored, without the redundancies of traditional hardware solutions.
Paired with easier feed-sharing and customizable security alerts, Verkada’s systems foster greater levels of proactivity and allow crises to be addressed in a more timely manner.
Deployment boosts educator confidence
Proper deployment of a Verkada security system helps foster a sense of stability within a school’s boundaries. Outside of the obvious benefit of general surveillance, this system provides proactive boons in other, less conspicuous ways. In fact, a highly visible surveillance system even works as a general crime deterrent. Not only can it capture incidents in real-time, but its mere presence has a preventive effect on would-be wrongdoers.
Some schools are even going so far as to employ Verkada cameras in the classroom to empower faculty members and ward off those harder-to-spot crimes such as theft, vandalism, and violence. Though there are some educators who feel that this crosses a boundary towards invasiveness and see it as the first step towards dystopia, an overwhelming 70 percent of teachers are in favor of heightened security and surveillance measures. As a result of a survey of educators, many believe that a greater proactive surveillance presence is a key component of a healthy school ecosystem, something Verkada strives to capture through their security solutions.
Security firms leading the charge
In response to this greater desire for more effective surveillance, a fair number of enterprise security agencies are developing technology to satisfy school districts throughout the country. Not only are they utilizing cloud compatibility in a more thoughtful way, but they’re also working to better secure the security systems themselves. For instance, Verkada has worked tirelessly to prevent common security gaps and eliminate potential points of failure. Their system allows for automatic updates and incorporates end-to-end encryption to thwart hacking attempts.
Verkada is also rapidly adapting to the notion of AI-driven technology. Premier surveillance systems harness AI to deliver automatic, proactive security alerts, flag camera inactivity or tampering, track metrics including motion activity and automatically pull videos that meet specified parameters. All of these are incredibly empowering when it comes to the prevention of student bullying, conflict resolution, vandalism, and class-cutting.
The biggest trend in security is the shift from reactivity to proactivity. It shortens response times and helps educators view security as less of a stopgap and more of a long-term addition to the safety of a school. While there’s a discussion to be had about the larger topic of privacy concerns and general boundaries, as it stands, proper implementation of a security system such as Verkada’s should be at the top of every administrator’s concerns.
