Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

Traverse City Schools Ensure Student and Staff Safety

  • 12/01/13

The Traverse City Area Public School District (TCAPS) covers 300 square miles over three counties in Michigan, with thousands of students, teachers and staff.

The increased need to protect them and the valuable public property of its 26 buildings prompted a custom security system to monitor all school activity from a central hub, integrating all security systems into one easy-to-use yet effective platform.

“We worked with multiple solutions over the years, each with pros and cons,” stated Paul Mahon, Director of Construction and Maintenance for TCAPS. “Installing one district-wide solution that supports our multiple levels of security ensures the safety of our students and staff — the number one priority.”

Milestone XProtect Corporate software allows authorized staff to monitor for safety, security and disciplinary actions at any time.

It is a full-scale, federated security solution that includes video streaming, alarm management, integrated access control via card access systems, emergency panic lockdowns, video synchronization and control of each system centrally.

TCAPS was a large-scale design that involved 26 unique structures for a vast amount of engineering: different wiring, ceiling setups and monitoring station locations with the centralized video surveillance integration.

XProtect was implemented quickly and efficiently, minimizing interruption for the administrators who monitor hundreds of cameras from Panasonic and Arecont Vision.

Throughout the district, 19 monitoring stations were established with HP video workstations, HP ProLiant video servers and HP StorageWorks for powerful storage capacity — important for so much video data.

Milestone XProtect Corporate supports an unlimited number of cameras, users and sites, making it the perfect match for TCAPS’ plans for additional cameras.

Since the security upgrade, there have been instances where school property was reported missing, and those trained to use the system monitored and reviewed the recorded events.

The evidence was quickly and easily exported from the Milestone system and provided to the local police with a built-in viewer. “XProtect is really well put together, powerful software that meets our complicated needs,” concludes Mahon.

Milestone Systems
www.milestonesys.com

This article originally appeared in the School Planning & Management December 2013 issue of Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Nashville Elementary School Receives LEED Gold Certification

    Goodlettsville Elementary School, part of Metro Nashville Public Schools in Nashville, Tenn., recently achieved LEED Gold Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), according to a news release. The 81,750-square-foot school opened in 2023 and was designed by Goodwyn Mills Cawood (GMC).

  • Building Beyond Simulation: Creating Immersive Ecosystems for Healthcare Education

    Health sciences education is one of the fastest-growing facility types in colleges and universities. The demand for medical, nursing, and allied health professionals is driving the creation and renovation of medical simulation training facilities that provide students with real-world experience through advanced simulation-based learning.

  • Planning with Clarity: Using AI to Make Better Campus Decisions, Not Just Better Designs

    Higher education leaders are being asked to make increasingly high-stakes decisions about campus facilities amid greater uncertainty than ever before. Social and economic pressures, shifting enrollment, and evolving learning models compete with growing deferred maintenance needs to strain even the most robust infrastructure budgets.

  • University of Pennsylvania Releases Design of Future Physical Sciences Building

    The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in Philadelphia, Penn., recently released renderings of an upcoming 350,000-square-foot Physical Sciences Building, according to news release. The facility was designed by CO Architects and will unite the university’s departments of Physics and Astronomy, Mathematics, and Earth and Environmental Science.