Pike county schools are seeking funds from the svpp grant opportunity to increase general school campus security, prevent daily violence occurrences, and provide increased security and safety to all…

Pike county schools are seeking funds from the svpp grant opportunity to increase general school campus security, prevent daily violence occurrences, and provide increased security and safety to all individuals in the occurrence of mass school event such as a school shooting or natural disaster. Pikes primary grant activity would be to upgrade its school-based analog security camera systems by purchasing advanced analytic IP cameras with enhanced image detection that would be connected to cloud-based storage servers. Upgraded analytics would allow schools to flag persons of interest for automated recognition and receive instant notices or alerts upon video detection. Cloud connectivity would allow US to give remote viewing capabilities to sros and other first responders such as the KY state police, the county sheriffs office, emts and the division of emergency management in the event there were a school crisis. Pike county is a rather large school district spanning about 786SQUARE miles. Being in a mountainous region of the state, its geography has many hollows and branches to primary driving routes. That being said, there is considerable distance between its schools and in most cases, large distances between schools and law enforcement and emergency service providers which are located primarily around the county seat at one end of the county. Many times, agencies are called such as the state police or ambulatory services and response times to sites can sometimes take from 45 minutes to an hour before arriving on site. The pike county sheriffs office currently provides school resource officers (sros) at several district sites on a day to day basis while school is in session. Due to our size and budgetary lmitations on both the school district and the local government, they only station an officer at each of the 5 high schools to monitor the upper grade level students. They periodically have those officers or other officers periodically stop by 3-4 adjacent feeder schools in each high school region if they are available. The school-based security cameras systems at each location are crucial to the sros for daily monitoring of school campuses, providing them live camera footage as well as video play back footage. Remote monitoring would give them the ability to monitor several locations simultaneously and mobilize quicker, potentially having advanced knowledge of occurrences prior to arriving on site. Camera systems have long been known to serve as major deterrents to unwanted student behavior and add to violence prevention on school campuses. Numerous articles and studies show that response times are dramatically increased during school bombings and mass shooting events when first responders have visibility inside a location during crisis situations. The primary expenditures of this project would to be to purchase equipment and licenses, no installation or professional services will be purchased. Installation and implementation services for equipment would be performed by local district staff. Training of local staff, law enforcement and emergency services providers would be done at no cost, provided by the vendor and school district personnel.