California School District Ensures Safety with Modern Surveillance Platform

• By Steve Prodger
• August 28, 2024

Laton Unified School District (LUSD) is a K-12 school district in Laton, Calif, located just south of Fresno in California's Central Valley. LUSD is comprised of four schools that serve about 700 students total. It's campus includes a preschool, an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school.

As a small district with limited resources, LUSD was struggling to maintain its aging surveillance infrastructure across the district schools. Video cameras are a vital component of keeping students and faculty safe, yet the cost to maintain these systems was prohibitive. And with cybersecurity threats like ransomware becoming more prominent, LUSD was concerned their systems were vulnerable to intrusion or tampering. Backups are limited, and if hardware fails, it's a good bet that the footage will be lost, too. With tight IT budgets and a lack of dedicated staff, LUSD needed to find a flexible solution that would leverage their existing infrastructure while improving reliability and ease of use.

After reviewing technology solutions from across the industry, LUSD decided Arcules would provide the simple, easy-to-use, cost-effective surveillance infrastructure they needed to keep students and faculty safe. The Arcules Cloud solution would enable LUSD to leverage their existing camera and network infrastructure while providing a seamless migration path for adding new equipment over time.

"One of the main reasons we decided to move to Arcules is it's all cloud-based, says Sue Vang, IT Director, LUSD. "It's all on one platform, which is much better than having to manage a server for each site with its own unique cameras."

To make this project possible, LUSD was able to take advantage of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund. ESSER funds offer schools and districts the flexibility to address their critical areas of need as they support their students, educators, and families. They can be used to pay for a wide variety of resources, including technology, allowing LUSD to offset the cost of their new security infrastructure.

With Arcules' unified, cloud-based platform, LUSD no longer has to worry about disparate servers for each site — all cameras and infrastructure can be managed from a single pane. LUSD is able to leverage all of their existing cameras and infrastructure with their new Arcules solution, reducing capex as well as management overhead. Arcules also enables LUSD to simplify their surveillance support structure by eliminating licensing complexity.

LUSD's new video surveillance infrastructure was easy to install and implement. Now LUSD administrators are able to quickly and easily access video data and upload it to Google Drive to share with whomever needs to view it. Arcules' flexible platform makes it easy to download and render video so IT staff aren't stuck waiting to retrieve video. And since they can now simply share a link to a video, there's no need to worry about copying it to a portable flash drive that might get lost or damaged.

"It's very convenient not having to physically download the media,” says Vang.

Arcules also integrates with the school district's other surveillance technology that is outside of the camera infrastructure. LUSD has a series of vapor detectors in bathrooms that are designed to detect vape smoke. When the alert gets triggered, LUSD's Arcules system sends out a notification immediately so that security and administrators can respond.

"Every time the system detects something out of the ordinary, we get an email right away," says Vang. "It's easy to use for people that may not have a background in camera technology."

Building on the success of their new Arcules solution, LUSD is looking to deploy additional cameras across their campuses to help staff more easily respond to incidences like vandalism, and bullying. With Arcules, administrators can more quickly and easily respond before the situations get out of control, helping keep students and facilities safe 24/7/365.

This article originally appeared in the September / October 2024 issue of Campus Security Today.