Murietta Valley District Schools modernizes surveillance with i-PRO

HOUSTON – i-PRO recently announced that the Murietta Valley Unified School District (MVUSD) in Riverside County, CA, has undertaken a project to modernize its first-generation surveillance with i-PRO network cameras, and the i-PRO Video Insight video management system (VMS).

MVUSD serves 23,000 students with nearly 4,000 employees. It comprises 11 elementary schools, four middle schools, three comprehensive high schools, two alternative high schools, one virtual, independent and homeschool academy and one adult transition school.

Following the establishment of a stakeholder team and development of a Prime Directive identifying the needs and expectations for a surveillance camera system, the district conducted extensive research and chose to standardize its security cameras system on i-PRO high-resolution network cameras and Video Insight VMS.

“The use cases for security camera systems in school districts can really vary,” said MVUSD Chief Technology Officer Jon Pratt. “Human resources, risk management, student support and its various roles, both centrally at district offices as well as on all sites -- each department has a different focus and their use of a system would tend toward different things. The Prime Directive guided us when there were competing interests.”

The MVUSD video security system is centralized, with a network operations center (NOC) at the district office and local monitoring at each school. Five servers move footage between the schools and the NOC. Additionally, MVUSD has established a collaboration with local police departments, which are able to connect to their camera system.

While the district hasn’t yet deployed analytics in its camera system, Pratt notes that they’re investigating the Smart Search capability included in i-PRO’s Active Guard analytics plug-in to their Video Insight VMS, which enables real-time searches and deep forensic analysis of their surveillance video, and other use cases where analytics can provide insight into anomalies and alerts.