Page 15 - Campus Security & Life Safety, July/August 2020

“It’s not so much about disciplining students who are vaping at school, but protecting our students’ health and making sure they get the help they need for substance abuse.”
By Monique Merhige
Vaping has grown in epidemic proportions over the past few years with schools across the country looking for effective ways to mitigate the situation quickly. *In 2018-2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Pre- vention (CDC) reported that 38 percent of high school students and 13 percent of middle school children have tried vaping.
Alarming Rates
These rates are alarming to most school administrators who want to provide a healthy and safe learning environment for students. We can all agree that the challenges facing schools today are enormous and requires the right dose of education and technology to help com- bat the vaping epidemic. Schools need to be clearly focused on the well-being and physical health of students in addition to safety.
Another challenge facing school administrators is how to monitor privacy areas, like bathrooms or locker rooms, where video cameras are not allowed. With these limitations, students have taken advan- tage of these privacy areas that are not under surveillance to carry out dangerous behaviors like vaping during school hours.
“It’s not so much about disciplining students who are vaping at school, but protecting our students’ health and making sure they get the help they need for substance abuse,” said Kristopher Harrison, Ed.D., Superintendent of Schools at Irvington Union Free School District. Irvington has developed educational programs to help stu- dents with substance abuse issues, as the district believes in educating students on the dangers of vaping to help them make healthier life- style choices.
Irvington is one of the school districts in New York that is proac- tive when it comes to vaping and researched various vape detection systems in the marketplace.
“After doing our due diligence, IPVideo Corporation’s HALO IOT Smart Sensor was selected by Irvington as the best fit for our needs to help deter vaping specifically in the restrooms. The device has been extremely accurate and has helped school leadership deal with the vaping issue effectively by identifying when and where our students have been vaping,” Harrison said. “In addition, it has given our school the ability to differentiate from typical vaping to those that have THC in it.”
IPVideo Corp. introduced HALO at the 2019 ISC West show in Las Vegas, winning new product of the year honors as a real-time vape detection and security device. The sensor not only detects regular vape; but can detect real-time smoke and vape with Nicotine or Mar- ijuana (THC oil). In addition to vape and smoke detection, HALO offers several safety features including abnormal sound detection, chemical detection and air quality monitoring; making it a powerful all-in-one solution. There are 12 sensors in HALO and the product catches over a million data points per day sending immediate alerts via text or email to school security personnel when thresholds are exceeded.
In April, IPVideo Corp. released HALO 2.0, which expanded the capabilities of the device even further to include such things as spo- ken keyword alerting, gunshot detection and masking signature iden- tification, which enables the device to detect when someone is trying
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Greg Hein