When discussing security in the education sector, it is important to realize that requirements vary greatly between different institutions, with the local primary school and the multi-campus university being the extremes.
Also, threats may vary from country to country or even differ between a primary school in a rural area and another one in the center of a major city within the same country. A security concept for an educational facility must therefore always be highly customized and take the specific threats into account. Properly identifying these problems for the specific facility is always the first step. There are a lot of threats that all schools have in common, but not necessarily to the same extent. Next to an incidental fire, the most common problems include:
· Rampages
· Vandalism
· Arson
· Mobbing and bullying
· Intrusion and theft
· Coercion and extortion
· Assault and battery
· Sexual offense and drug delicts
The intensity and frequency of such offenses depends highly on the type of school as well as the geographic and social environments. A primary school in a rural area will be less vulnerable to e.g. drug offenses than a middle school in a major city characterized by high unemployment rates. It is therefore important to take a closer look at potential offenders - will they more likely be students, faculty, staff or outsiders? Or maybe former students with detailed knowledge of the facilities? Another important consideration is whether you are dealing with an open campus which is legally accessible 24x7 or with a school that is closed overnight and on weekends, giving potential intruders all the time they need to overcome basic security systems.
Like anywhere else, the major goals of a security concept for schools include the safety of people, in this case mainly students and teachers, and the protection of physical assets. However, being safe does not necessarily equal feeling safe, and vice versa, and making people feel safe is another important goal. To reach these goals, a combination of technical and behavioral measures must be taken.
Apart from the implementation of technical systems, a security concept for schools should include measures to:
· raise awareness of teachers and students
· educate students
· prevent crime through alertness and a general anti-crime policy
· enforce the rules of the house
It may also be useful to form crisis intervention teams and to name specific teachers that students can report crimes or unusual events to.
From a technical perspective, there are a lot of proven technologies to improve safety and security in schools and universities. Today, most of these technologies, such as fire detection and evacuation systems or video surveillance, can be networked and operated as one integrated system. Management and operations can be carried out from a local or a remote console. This allows installation of security systems even on sites where no technical experts are employed - an important consideration for smaller schools. In larger environments, this kind of integration leads to dramatically reduced operational expenses.
When every second counts
In the event of a fire, time is of the essence. Automatic fire detection should therefore be required for all primary and high schools as well as universities. You simply cannot rely on the facility manager or a teacher to detect a fire in time, neither during nor after school hours. Modern fire detection systems will not only detect smoke and fire much faster and more reliably, but will also be able to automatically communicate with evacuation systems and send an alarm to the next fire station. In a lot of countries, there is a regulation which usually refers to international, or sometimes national, norms and sets minimum requirements for fire detection and evacuation systems.
In a small primary school it may be enough to educate teachers how to react to a fire alarm and evacuate the building. There is a limited number of teachers and students, and all of them are familiar with the environment, easing this process. Also, younger children may easily be confused by automated evacuation instructions and be better off relying on their teacher and following her or his instructions. However, a highly intelligible voice evacuation system is required for larger schools and campuses. Here you have up to thousands of people across a multi-building campus and they are not being as closely supervised as in the primary school. Also, you cannot rely on everybody being familiar with the premises and the escape routes. A voice evacuation system supporting multiple zones such as Bosch's fully digital Praesideo will allow the distribution of targeted evacuation instructions to affected parts of the campus only, guaranteeing fast evacuation without interfering with operations in other unaffected parts of the campus.
The number one priority in PA (Public Address) is of course speech intelligibility, as messages have to be clearly understood by everybody anywhere on the premises. But still today, a lot of the older schools operate with very scratchy announcements that are mostly incomprehensible and can turn out to be deadly in the worst case. Here a lot of backlog has to be worked off. The good news is that a modern voice evacuation system can also double as a PA system for general announcements.
In larger environments it is also necessary to use addressable fire detectors to automatically locate the alarm without taking up valuable time. The information that a smoldering fire has been detected somewhere is not of much use to the fire department. Modern alarm panels with intelligent bus systems therefore provide a way to uniquely identify and also localize each individual alarm. To accomplish this, optical, thermal and chemical sensors with different levels of sensitivity can be used to adapt to the varying requirements of individual sections of the buildings. On large university campuses with their great variety of buildings, a network of multiple fire panels covering individual structures may be necessary. In this case, modular systems like Bosch's Modular Fire Panel 5000 Series enable the operator to tailor fire protection solutions to the very specific requirements of individual buildings, while still operating the entire solution as an integrated system. With such architecture it is possible to keep the cable paths from the control center to peripheral elements short, or to logically separate individual areas of a campus.
Another issue which may come up, primarily in universities, is securing specific infrastructures such as data centers, laboratories or even an in-house power plant. Some of these infrastructures require specific fire detectors or additional measures like reducing the air's oxygen content in data centers. In such cases it is extremely important to select an installer with this specific expertise.
See what is going on
In order to preventcrimes and offenses, video surveillance enjoys ever increasing acceptance. However, when considering video surveillance in schools it is always challenging to balance the protection of students with possible privacy concerns. There is also a broad spectrum of threats that video surveillance is designed to deal with; some of these are much more relevant to some school types than to others. Video surveillance can be used for various purposes, for example the monitoring of entrances and exits, identification of people or collection of behavioral data.
In smaller schools, video surveillance will usually be used to monitor entrances, exits and for perimeter protection to signalize unauthorized access or help to collect evidence in cases of vandalism. Mid-sized schools with teenage students may also see a need to monitor some indoor areas to help reduce bullying, sexual offenses or other forms of violence between students. Here, video surveillance may also be used to protect the school against theft of valuable resources such as computers. Large high schools and universities have pretty much the same requirements, but on a much larger scale. As they operate sensitive environments, such as biological and chemical laboratories or data centers, they often see the need to also use video surveillance to verify alarms triggered by an intrusion detection system or to double check access requests managed by the access control system. It may also be important to secure outdoor areas around the clock, which requires very light sensitive cameras with or without integrated infrared lighting that are weather and vandalism resistant. With its starlight technology, Bosch has developed a solution for extreme low-light environments, delivering high quality color images where other cameras offer black and white only, while enabling detailed black and white images where others produce no picture at all.
How do you balance students’ safety with their privacy? Video surveillance and management solutions from Bosch facilitate multiple possibilities to securely manage user access rights. Another possibility is applying a four-eye principle. Recorded video may only be played back when two authorized persons enter their respective passwords. In this way it can be safeguarded that only authorized people have access to video material when needed.
Another challenge is the fact that there are limited human resources to operate a surveillance system. This is where Intelligent Video Analysis (IVA) from Bosch comes in. Cameras with built-in IVA enable, for example, the automatic triggering of alarms and detection of objects if interest without the need for security personnel to watch surveillance monitors around the clock. It allows the cameras to only stream video to the control room when pre-defined alarm rules are met. This frees up personnel capacity since IVA helps to focus attention. It also improves the quality of video surveillance solutions substantially, since research shows that even a well trained security guard can miss 90 percent of scene activity when watching multiple monitors for 20 minutes. IVA is never asleep nor tired and alerts security guards when needed. IVA can also help to save money by only streaming relevant information, reducing storage and network requirements substantially.
Look who's walking
In most schools, the facility manager has an arduous task. Carrying a thick bunch of keys, one of his main responsibilities is to open and lock doors as needed. This may sound easy in an elementary school where you usually open the main door in the morning and lock it again after school hours, while many internal doors have no lock. Unauthorized access to restricted areas is not really an issue here. The same is true for intrusion. There are not a lot of assets in an elementary school that might attract intruders at night. Standard precautions like secure doors and windows may therefore be sufficient to protect the school against an opportunistic vandal, unless it is located in a critical environment.
Not so with other types of schools. A lot of them have valuable assets to protect, like computers, other technical equipment or books in the library, and all are prone to both theft and vandalism. Also, older students may be much more inclined to access teacher-only rooms than first graders. In addition, school facilities are sometimes also used for public events, like a sports event, a local theatre group or an open council. Visitors to such events are not usually allowed access to other rooms and facilities within the school. In such a situation, a facility manager with his large key ring is no longer the solution; this is even more true on a university campus.
An automated access control system with key cards can efficiently grant or deny access to individual rooms based on personal access rights. This way, you can effectively secure special rooms like offices, computer rooms, laboratories or any other critical environments against unauthorized access. Such a system can also track access attempts and alert security personnel if needed. Another benefit is that lost keys are no longer a problem as the system allows you to simply disable a lost card and issue a new one to the owner. Using sophisticated access control systems with modular controllers and local memory, it is also possible to design access control solutions which remain fully operational even when the underlying network goes down for any reason.
While access control systems are well suited to limit access via the front door, not everybody is willing to enter that way. This is why valuable assets or critical infrastructures at high schools and universities will also have to be secured by an intrusion detection system. In connected environments, both intrusion detection and access control systems can be tightly integrated with an existing video surveillance solution, allowing the school to verify alarms and alerts through live images which are automatically transmitted to a control room.
Integration increases security while reducing cost
If you want to design and implement an integrated safety and security infrastructure for a larger school or university, one critical component will be the central management system which is used to control and operate all the individual subsystems such as fire, intrusion or video. It makes it possible to automatically correlate alarms and other information from the individual subsystems. If required, targeted measures can be taken very quickly when responding to dangerous situations or incidents in any educational facility. Additionally, central management is primarily responsible for ensuring that complex installations, such as those in larger campuses, can be operated efficiently and economically. Some of these management systems, such as the Building Integration System (BIS) from Bosch, even go beyond just controlling security technologies, and can also integrate other building automation systems that use network connections. This allows, for example, to integrate security technology with HVAC systems (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) and to efficiently use real time data collected by the security systems to monitor and control the HVAC environment, resulting in savings on energy.