Scoring High Marks
Rural school district makes the grade with security strategy
- By Leon Langlais
- Nov 01, 2011
Highway 94, which runs a ruler-straight path
between Colorado Springs, Colo., and Kansas,
is about the only thing that breaks up the vista
of lush, green alfalfa fields and cattle ranches
in eastern Colorado. The town of Rush is
one of several unincorporated towns that dot
the Highway's path, and it is the rural home to
a population of fewer than 750 people.
Located 40 miles east of Colorado Springs—the state’s secondmost-
populous city, nestled at the base of the iconic Pikes Peak in the
Rocky Mountains—Rush also is home to the only school building in
the Miami-Yoder School District, which for years struggled with
many issues stemming from its remote location and the poor condition
of its facilities. The district, which serves a 500-square-mile area
of three counties in this rural part of Colorado, was spending a significant
portion of its budget busing students elsewhere to provide
them with services not available at the school.
The Challenge
The Miami-Yoder School, which serves the needs of students in prekindergarten
through high school, needed a new facility to remedy
some significant safety and security issues. Most notably, the district
needed a building with fewer accessible entrance and exit points than
its then-current arrangement, a mixture of a nearly 100-year-old main
building and series of aging portable classrooms, some of which dated
back to the 1970s, replete with leaking roofs and sagging floors. Not
only were the portable classrooms cramped and in disrepair, but students
often had to leave the buildings and walk around the campus,
which borders a huge cattle ranch on one side, to reach their next class.
In May 2007, the school went into lockdown due to a shooting
threat from a high school senior who found out he would not be
graduating. As a result of the campus’s fragmented nature, it took law
enforcement more than two hours to clear the buildings and grounds.
Also, due to the school’s remote location, it took the responding
SWAT team nearly 45 minutes to arrive at the school from nearby El
Paso County.
“That was a big concern out here because of our location,” said
Rick Walter, the district’s superintendent. “In the event of an incident,
it’s very difficult for law enforcement to respond, and we needed to
have our own processes in place to ensure the safety of students until
their arrival.”
The construction of a new facility for Miami-Yoder would ensure
that administrative staff could take advantage of technology that
would allow school officials to control entry to the building and have
access to surveillance video footage of incidents as they unfold.
Administrators also wanted the security system to help manage the
activities of the school population—controlling student and staff
access to certain areas and using the system as a deterrent to ward off
such incidents as vandalism or minor assaults. Administrators also
valued it as an investigative or evidentiary aid should any incidents
occur on school grounds.
The Solution
Thanks to Colorado’s Building Excellent Schools Today (BEST) program,
the town of Rush is now home to one of the newest and most
technologically advanced school facilities in the state. Funded by an
$18.1 million BEST grant, the new Miami-Yoder School consists of a
91,000-square-foot building that features new construction; renovated
spaces; several new classrooms for the school’s 300 students;
new and remodeled gymnasiums; and new spaces for special education,
music, art and vocational instruction in welding, woodworking
and agricultural mechanics.
Despite all these advances, school administrators ranked their new
access control, intrusion and surveillance system from Tyco Security
Products, designed and installed by Denver-based systems integrator
Secure All Solutions, as perhaps the new school’s most important
technological improvement. Access through the building’s 11 doors—
including three main entrances into the elementary and middle
school wings, one into the main administrative offices and several
interior doors separating different areas of the school—can, for the
first time, be controlled automatically using the EntraPass Corporate
Edition access control platform from Kantech.
“Being able to finally control access to the entrances and exits of
our facility was really one of the primary drivers of our construction,”
Walter said. “Not only does this limit access through our exterior
doors, but it limits the amount of traffic roaming the hallways within
our building and between the different areas of our school.”
The vocational arts teacher, for example, would have access to the
school’s new 1,900-square-foot vocational wing and its welding and
metal-working workshops, woodworking area and a greenhouse,
and to one of the school’s five computer labs. But he would not have
access to the elementary wing. Likewise, facilities staff and certain
administrators would be the only people granted access to the
school’s physical plant, which houses the new ground source pumps
for heating and cooling. They, along with solar photovoltaic arrays
on the school’s roof, are expected to reduce utility costs to less than
$1 per square foot.
“For such a small, rural school, they could have kept their access
control system simple and not integrated with intrusion or surveillance
video,” said John Castle, president of Secure All Solutions. “We
were working with a blank slate on this project, and it became clear
early on that they wanted a first-class type of system to meet the security
challenges identified at Miami-Yoder school.”
Working with Secure All project manager Cory Franklin, school
officials required that all doors be locked and remain secured
throughout the day, with the exception of a 20-minute period each
morning when students and staff arrive. Visitors, including parents,
vendors and other guests, must gain entry using telephone entry systems
at each of the three main entrances. When the building is not
occupied during non-school hours or holidays, it remains protected
and secured with DSC PowerSeries intrusion alarm panels, also integrated
into the EntraPass software.
For the first time, administrators can monitor conditions within
each classroom, hallway and other common areas, including the
gymnasium and cafeteria, and exterior areas, such as parking lots,
using a mix of about 80 American Dynamics IP and analog cameras.
Two American Dynamics HDVRs, which handle both IP and analog
video feeds, integrate into the EntraPass software, which can automatically
call up a corresponding camera view of an access control
event, such as a person entering a door or someone presenting an
invalid badge, Castle said. The cameras record to two 32-channel
HDVRs, one handling video from the north side of the building and
another from the south. Video is stored for 30 days, but the school
has the capability to increase that to 90 days if necessary.
The cameras focus on the students’ behavior in the classroom and
not the performance of the teachers, per Colorado regulations. Surveillance
footage has already aided in the resolution of several incidents,
including minor vandalism, thefts of items from backpacks,
and disputes between teachers and students. It has served as an
instrumental tool in an expulsion hearing.
School officials can also view video and access events and reporting,
and they can manage the system from their desks in the school’s
administrative offices or remotely using a Web browser. This ability
for remote access using Kantech’s Remote Client also makes it possible
to provide real-time management and surveillance capabilities to
local law enforcement agencies, which are able to access the system
both at a central dispatch location as well as from their patrol cars,
with the ability to completely lockdown the school if necessary.
This remote access also provides conveniences when servicing the
system. “If there is a problem, we’re able to diagnose more than 85
percent of that system from our offices more than two hours away,”
Castle said.
By employing a strategy of using state-of-the-art technology to
improve security and safety conditions and significantly reduce ongoing
operational costs, Miami-Yoder School satisfied the district’s
goals of becoming a safe and secure environment for students, staff
and the surrounding community. Now residents of the town of Rush
have a local landmark of their own.
This article originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of Security Today.