Page 94 - Security Today, November/December 2019

“More than 4.1 million students endured
at least one genuine lockdown in the
2017-2018 school year.” By Margie Gurwin
Preventing Mechanical Breakdowns
Access control solution helps Arkansas school protect students from intruders
Wireless Lockdowns
When a high school actually wears out lock mechanisms while trying to keep its students safe, it is definitely time for a cloud-based wireless upgrade.
To protect Corning High School students in Arkansas from intruders, all classroom doors were kept locked and
the teachers opened and relocked them as needed.
“You would be surprised how many times a key was used in each
door throughout the day. It was unbelievable,” said Principal Jennifer Woolard. The lock mechanisms were literally worked to death.”
Corning School District is rural and has a small budget.
“We’re losing industry \[jobs\] like a lot of rural communities and so we are experiencing declining enrollment,” said Kellee Smith, super- intendent at Corning School District. “We have about 860 children districtwide, not counting preschool. There are about 420 in the high school, grades seven to twelve.”
Smith said that having to manually lock and unlock the doors also made effective lockdown plans problematic, and in today’s world, having a plan and drilling on it, is not optional.
More than 4.1 million students endured at least one genuine lock- down in the 2017-2018 school year. This was revealed in a first-of-its- kind analysis by the Washington Post released in December 2018. That number was derived from a review of 20,000 news stories and data from school districts in 31 of the country’s largest cities. School districts outside of major metro areas experience lockdowns too, and like many city schools, their buildings are often older—built before the 21st-Century’s active shooter phenomenon emerged.
Corning High School was built in 1967 and comprises seven build- ings connected by breezeways, with about 50 classrooms, a gymna- sium, an auditorium, cafeteria and library.
“It is open, like a lot of schools were back in the 60s. During the school day, students go from classroom to classroom, which often involves moving between various buildings,” Woolard said. “Every 50 minutes, students may go outside to get to a new classroom. We don’t have a way to fence in our property to keep outsiders off our campus. So, basically, the way our buildings are set up, anybody can be outside and when the bell rings to change classes, they can come in and min- gle with our students.”
Help on the Horizon
The school district chose integrators Blue Sky Technologies of Jones- boro, Arkansas to handle the project. Smith says the company had aided the district in the past, installing security cameras and trouble- shooting with Internet problems encountered in the old school build- ings. “In the day-to-day operations of schools, you’ve got to have people that you can count on to show up. They’ve shown us we can trust them,” Smith said.
Smith says the district looked at other options before it began working with Blue Sky, but nothing seemed to fit the bill. After learn- ing about the high school’s access control problem, Blue Sky offered
the district a higher-quality solution and at a better price, Smith said. Brian Duckworth, sales consultant with Blue Sky, explains why the pdk.io access control system by ProdataKey (PDK) was the obvious
choice from an integrator’s—and a cost-saving—perspective.
“The layout of the school, with its multiple buildings, really lent itself to the solution, since we didn’t have to get copper or fiber out to these remote locations. I’d estimate that just the cabling alone would have cost in excess of $60,000 dollars to connect all those buildings,
and that doesn’t include the associated labor,” Duckworth said. Additionally, the cloud-based system provides definite advantages, including around-the-clock accessibility, remote management, supe- rior backup and redundancy, regular updates and ramped-up cyber
security.
He explains the scope of the installation: “The initial phase was 14
doors, all done wirelessly, which gives them the ability to manage it seamlessly and remotely from one interface.”
The first phase included the exterior doors to various buildings, plus other locations such as the principal’s office. The goal was to control access through major hallways and corridors first. In the future, when time and budgets allow- and because of the almost lim- itless scalability of the PDK solution- Blue Sky will add additional doors as needed throughout the entire high school campus, as well as the other district buildings.
“It is just a matter of tacking them onto the existing system. The new doors will just be added to the same managing interface. With PDK’s scalability, we can add as many doors as we like, up to the entire campus,” Duckworth said.
The installation was completed in November 2018.
“We were probably there about two weeks getting everything put in and programmed, working on end-user training and making sure that the tech staff and others knew how to use the system; how to unlock doors remotely, how to add users, do all those types of things that they would need to manage on a daily basis after the initial implementation and programming,” Duckworth said.
He says staff training was provided on-site.
“Our technician sat down with all of the school’s senior adminis- trators and technical staff and went through the entire PDK interface. It was hands-on training. We wanted to make sure their entire team was really comfortable using the solution.”
High-tech Hall Pass
For teachers, staff and administrators, operating the PDK solution is easy as A-B-C. “They were all assigned fobs to unlock the doors. Stu- dents don’t have fobs but teachers have special ones that they sign out to students who need to leave the classroom for some reason, for example, to go to the library,” Duckworth said. “The fobs are assigned to a specific classroom, so when they’re used by a student, we can see what classroom they came from and be aware if any teacher is letting kids out of class too frequently.”
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