Surveillance

OK District Puts Video Surveillance into 4 Schools

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 04/15/15

A school district in Oklahoma has gone public with its implementation of video surveillance, which it put in place after mopping up from vandalism that cost between $20,000 and $30,000. The system at Kingston Public School District includes 172 IP cameras from D-Link, as well as a storage area network and video management software.

District Director of Technology Bill Wolff said the video system stopped misbehavior quickly. "The security cameras are doing their job and, when questioned, the students give up information pretty easily," he noted. "Our IP surveillance solution has helped us resolve a lot of issues. And the color images are clear enough that we can see a lot of detail — even from far away."

The school system, which has four schools and about 1,350 students, ran several rounds of vendor assessments. Working with Texas-based system integrator Preferred Technology Solutions, a D-Link reseller, Wolff and his team were introduced to D-Link products, which, he said, ended up being priced "much lower" than some of the competition. A live demonstration for the school board sealed the deal.

"We had to ask ourselves 'why spend a thousand more dollars per camera than we need to,'" said Wolff. "Another big selling point was D-Link's five-year warranty on many of the cameras."

Wolff said he believes that D-Link's help was crucial to the success of the project. "They came to the rescue quite often, and today the system is running great — I haven't had to even touch it in 18 months. It's 95 percent maintenance-free and I don't have to worry about it at all. From a technical director's standpoint, it's absolutely perfect."