Larry Griffin
lgriffin@thesmokymountaintimes.com
On a camera feed accessible by laptop, local school officials can see all the angles of the parking lot of Swain County High, and technology from the Verkada security system they use lets them identify every person and every vehicle that passes through.
According to Superintendent Mark Sale and Director of School Safety Toby Burrell, they can keep tabs on anyone on any of their campuses. Another feature lets them type in a shirt color and track everyone with that color of shirt with the cameras.
“If we’ve heard something is going on, and we need to locate that person, we can follow them from place to place,” Burrell said. “Or we could have a description of them getting off a bus, and we can track them to a classroom.”
In addition, Burrell said the cameras are accessible from Verkada, based on the Cloud, and that any school personnel with access will be able to see the cameras any time they need to – teachers and bus drivers, among other personnel, will be able to look at the array of cameras and alert security if need be.
Sale said the system is accessible from anywhere, too. “I could be in Hawaii,” he said.
It all sounds like something straight from a science fiction novel, but in reality, it’s part of the school system’s efforts to make sure their security is airtight. With the trend of shootings and violent incidents at schools for years now, Sale and Burrell said they don’t want to take any chances.
The security system has been in use by Swain County Schools for the past several years, but Sale and Burrell said they’re trying to ensure everything in every school is covered. With the help of state grant money, they’re expanding their amount of cameras to both elementary schools and adding new cameras to fight blind spots at all the schools.
School board members also toured all the local schools on July 14 with officials and brainstormed on potential blind spots and security ideas, which Sale said had been a productive event.
The new equipment added this year includes 91 cameras, which cost $129,730 from grant money.
In addition, there were 10 new swipe doors purchased, each costing $3,550.
Both of those fundings come from the North Carolina Center for Safer Schools, which is part of the state’s Department of Public Instruction.
The swipe doors are meant to be more secure in preventing attackers from entering the buildings.
“The swipe doors were put on the outside of East and West,” Burrell said. “It’s so faculty does not have to prop the doors open when they go outside.”
Sale said this now means all their schools are single-entrance, meaning all doors “should be shut and locked” and traffic will have to go through the main doors alone.
All of it is part of the effort from the schools to ensure that no blind spots remain and any threats can be immediately assessed. Burrell said they’re also working on getting new lights for the high school, working with Duke Energy on that goal.