California District Looks for Sponsor Dollars To Fund Surveillance System

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 03/24/09
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The San Ysidro School Board and Sunset Elementary School in San Ysidro, CA have begun a marketing campaign to find sponsors to foot the bill for a wireless surveillance service from SensorWave Technology to monitor the school grounds. The school, which is about a mile from a United States-Mexico border crossing south of San Diego, has become an after-hours haven for alcohol consumption, drugs, and prostitution, activities that leave behind school yard flotsam such as bottles, drug paraphernalia, and graffiti.

The company heard of the district's needs and provided a free security assessment. Now it's helping the district, which serves 5,550 students, find sponsorships to fund the cost of installation and operation of Virtual Patrol, SensorWave's surveillance service. The service provides real-time viewing of alerts via an Internet connection to security, public safety, and administration personnel both onsite and offsite.

The security platform includes wireless video surveillance, which analyzes and responds to events while it records and sends alerts to a live monitoring center; video verification to security, police, and other rescue personnel delivered by a Web connection to laptops, dispatch, and handheld devices; and live "talk-down" voice deterrence, which enables trained staff to communicate through on-site speakers to deter problems or act as back-up to security and first responders in notifications.

To pay for the service, the district is offering rights to signage claiming sponsorship for the security throughout Sunset Elementary.

"The goal is to change bad behavior. The costs associated with bad behavior has significant ramifications to the students, teachers, the administration, facilities manager, and the community as a whole," said Kendell Lang, SensorWave CEO.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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