The school resource officer finds his own footage now
Athens Area School District covers 178 square miles of Pennsylvania. Its IT director used to be the person called for every clip. What changed, and how a vape sensor got a camera.
Athens Area School District covers more than 178 square miles of northeast Pennsylvania and serves six boroughs and townships. That is a lot of ground for one IT department, and until recently every request for video footage landed on it.
Clint Nichols, the district's director of information technology, describes the old arrangement in Spot AI's published account of the deployment.
I've always been the person called to help track down footage because previous systems were more cumbersome and time consuming. With Spot, I've been able to easily train our SROs and other staff to find footage themselves and to build a Case to resolve incidents. This takes the burden off IT.
The flash drive problem
The account spells out what resolving an incident used to involve: search through footage, download it, create files and add them to folders, upload them to a shared drive or a flash drive, and only then share the video. Each of those steps went through Nichols.
The district's fix was to change who is allowed to search. Principals, assistant principals, school resource officers and other administrative staff now have their own access to the cameras, scoped to what they should see. The district says this puts more eyes where they are needed.
A car accident, and a Case
One example in the published account shows how the work moves now. After a car accident in front of the elementary school, the SRO on site found the footage himself and started building a Case, the system's folder for a single incident. He then tagged the IT team in the Case to pull additional camera angles.
The officer began the investigation and IT was called in only for the part it alone could do. Under the old system the first call would have gone to Nichols.
Vape sensors and video
The district also wanted its cameras to talk to other equipment in the building, and the account describes one integration in detail: HALO vape detection sensors. When a sensor fires, a principal or SRO receives the alert and can tie it to the video from that time and place, according to Spot AI's account, to see who was vaping and where.
A vape sensor on its own tells you something happened near a bathroom. With the camera tied to it, the principal can see who walked in and out before picking up the phone to a parent.
Why they chose it
Nichols's second quote is about the vendor.
With Spot AI, not only is the product there and works great, but they are always listening and growing. They're constantly improving, open to feedback, and building true partnerships with their customers.
School districts buy camera systems on long cycles and live with the consequences. The account describes the previous system as clunky, with features that were not always useful and usability problems for IT leadership. The district's stated goal for its replacement was a system that would not be obsolete by the next budget.
No dollar figure or time saving is published for Athens. The result the district points to is a change in who does the work. When an SRO needs footage now he pulls it himself, and Nichols hears about it only if another camera angle is needed.