Page 65 - Security Today, November/December 2020

Prestigious NYC College
Creates a Clear Path to Recovery
For more than six decades, the School of Visual Arts (SVA) has been a leader in the education of artists, designers and creative professionals. Comprised of approximately 4,200 stu¬dents and 650 staff members at its Manhattan cam- pus, SVA has built a reputation as being one of the most influen-tial artistic communities in the world. With its classrooms, facilities and offices occupying space in 14 buildings in Manhattan, campus safety has always been a priority for the college. SVA started putting together their game plan for the fall semester back in April 2020 when NYC was still completely shut down and in lock-down mode. In order to keep students and staff safe, a number of actions were put in place by SVA.
First, all classes for the fall 2020 semester were offered online, while staff members who were able to work remotely could do so. For the fall semester, the college allowed access to only 500 students on campus to use facilities and tracked everything using an online desk reservation system. Students and staff who accessed the campus facilities were required to view training videos prior to their arrival on the proper use of a face mask and hand hygiene. The college’s main focus was to reduce the risk and likelihood of ill- ness on the SVA campus; therefore everyone entering the facility must attest to their health first and foremost. For students living on campus in the SVA residence halls, sig- nificant de-densification measures were instituted. Each resident student at SVA now had their own private room and private bathroom. Shared common areas and spaces, such as elevators, lounges and laundry rooms have reduced occupancy limits posted to ensure adequate distancing.
In order to make this all happen in a short timeframe, SVA needed a trusted security ven- dor that could work with their IT, security, facilities and executive management team effectively. In June 2020, SVA turned to their trusted security partner, SAS Technologies Corp (SAS), who has been working with them on prior security upgrades over the past four
years. SAS, is a Certified Minority Women Owned (M/WBE) Long Island-based security integrator who has provided integrated secu- rity solutions to a wide clientele base for the past 15 years. The management team at SVA felt confident using SAS and knew that they would implement the latest COVID-19 secu- rity solutions for a safe re-opening.
“Working with the team at SAS to imple- ment these new safety technologies was an absolute pleasure,” said Cosmin Tomescu CIO and Privacy Officer at SVA. “We look for trust, integrity, skills, professionalism, and good communication from our vendors; and SAS has exceeded our expectation on all these requirements.”
SAS Brings New COVID-19
Technology to Life at SVA
SVA was proactive in planning its action plan early on to help safeguard the college from the new COVID-19 world that was imploding around them. The COVID requirements were quite complex and at times extremely chal- lenging for the school to navigate in clearly unchartered waters. SAS quickly brought together the key players who could help with the security upgrade and recommended the best course of action to the SVA. This included four separate security upgrades running in tandem all managed by the SAS team of pro- fessionals.
“SAS Technologies has a wealth of experi- ence working with many other higher educa- tion institutions in the tri-state area,” Tomes- cu said. “The relationship and trust we built over the years was one of the important fac- tors we looked at when choosing them for these important projects.” With two of the four upgrades planned prior to the pandem- ic, the college accelerated the projects, and decided to speed up the projects and deploy much quicker due to COVID-19.
To prepare for the fall semester, “SVA Safe,” a mobile application that allows staff, faculty and students to take the CDC required questionnaire prior to entering the campus was deployed on everyone’s mobile phones. The system allowed for data reten-
tion in order to implement contact tracing as required by New York State and the CDC. This pre-arrival screening app “SVA Safe” which requires persons to take their temper- ature then answer questions about symptoms (as defined by the CDC), and screening questions about testing positive for COVID- 19, being exposed to the virus and recent travel. After answering answering the ques- tions, users are presented with either an “approval” or “stay home” badge, and a QR code that needs to be presented to the on-site security guards for access.
The second upgrade included a lobby ID scanning solution from LenelS2, to identify visitors as they enter the campus. ID Scan- ning stations were installed in every lobby at SVA to track any staff, faculty and students entering the facilities. SAS also implemented an integrated visitor management solution called Splan. Currently, SVA has SPLAN deployed in 8 locations and can easily expand it to other locations on campus.
Visitor Management
The Splan solution provides next generation cloud and enterprise-level visitor management solutions delivering intelligent and fully auto- mated, self-service visitor check-in processes. Splan supports rules-based configurations and workflow approvals. SVA is using workflow approvals when students create a visit request. Resident authority or roommates have to approve visit requests for overnight visit and underage visitors. Students can use Splan’s Sign In Easy mobile to create visit requests and approvals from their mobile phones.
“The SAS team took the lead on this proj- ect, while balancing the requirements of the customer and working with Splan to design and implement the proper use-cases and overall solution that met SVA’s needs,” said Pat Figley, senior vice president of Global Sales and Operations at Splan.
The new technologies seamlessly interacts with the existing LenelS2 solution to identify visitors as they enter campus. As part of the ID management process, kiosk-based sys- tems were installed in every lobby that
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