Mississippi School District Installs IQinVision Megapixel Cameras
The Meridian Public School District (MPSD) in Mississippi has installed approximately 373 IQinVision IQeye HD megapixel cameras at their 12 school buildings and campuses. The Meridian Public School District has over 6,000 students in grades K-12 with more than 550 certified staff and approximately 500 classified staff.
At the end of the 2010 school year, MPSD embarked on their ambitious plan to install a unified video surveillance system in all their schools. By the start of the next school year, the system was up and running and the hundreds of IQeye 2 MP Alliance domes were transmitting new, high quality video images for security and administration personnel.
“In this initial phase, we were looking to migrate a number of different systems and old camera technologies to a single, upgraded system covering all our schools,” said Tim Boutwell, MPSD director of technology.
The focus was to get all the elementary and middle schools covered, as well as portions of the high school campus. Despite budget constraints and the occasional installation challenge, the system was up and running in short order and has been delivering positive results.
IQeye cameras are deployed at six elementary schools, three middle schools, and the vocational center at the high school to cover bus lanes, parent pick-up lanes, school entrances/exits, administrative offices, as well as many hallways.
“We had been talking about upgrading video surveillance for some time,” said Boutwell. “This project fit right in line with our number one district goal: safe and orderly schools. Now, there is no question that we have a much better idea what is going on at each of our campuses and that we have achieved a higher level of accountability.”
Video is monitored at each school location by school personnel, using a 22-inch monitor at his/her workstation. Each principal also has access to their school’s video, ensuring that at each school at least two people can monitor video at all times. At the District office, the Director of Security and the Director of Maintenance have access to video from all 373 cameras and they provide important back-up monitoring to the efforts at each school. The IQeye Alliance domes offer H.264 Main Profile compression, enabling MPSD to view and record at 30 frames per second. Video is stored for approximately one week.
Meridian staff have been using the new system for about five months.
“This video system makes it very easy for each principal to know who is on campus,” said Boutwell. “We have great views of each campus and the surrounding areas. It’s a tremendous benefit. We frequently have ‘he said, she said’ incidents, and now the principal can easily and quickly go back and see exactly what happened. We also have some vandalism, and we have been able to catch the offenders based on the video images—it’s worked tremendously for that. Boutwell reports that he’s confident that Meridian School’s identification of vandals and other perpetrators has greatly improved. “We’re pleased with the image quality of the cameras. We’re really enjoying the new cameras.”
The future calls for adding cameras and areas under surveillance as budget becomes available.