May 2022 May 2022 - Committee of the Whole - Board of Education Meeting

6:09PM May 17, 2022

Speakers:

Tim Ivey

Keywords:

cameras

ricotta

system

check

controls

school district

access

question

vapes

years

ability

sensors

add

includes

retention

cost

door

installed

vaping

principal

As we met last Committee of the Whole and board meeting, we talked about on two safety grants that allowed us to purchase some cameras for the high school, those grants are those cameras equal to just over a million dollars. And with the ability of having those grant funds, it only ended up costing our school district $225,000. So working with that, berkata, we came up with an idea for a joint partnership, which would turn the Iredale, Statesville schools in into what ricotta is calling a center of excellence. And that would be a place where others could come to see the Takata system integrated throughout the district. Now, the importance of having an integrated technology or safety system in your district is that its ease of use is the ability for you as a person who's over the facilities, including the principals, and emergency management system, for you to be able to have ease of access, tracking down individuals, and better monitoring of what we have what we currently have in our school district. District as far as camera system, as far as what we're seeing is guest check in is very outdated. Once we put it in, it has about a one to two year warranty. Many of the items don't last much past that time. And so what we see is we're replacing cameras and DVRs at regular rate each year, which includes somewhere around $250,000. So we're currently spending a lot on upkeep on a system that is very outdated. Our guest check in is run through identity kid, which schools are currently paying for themselves and doesn't really have any way to integrate into the system. So once a person checks in, there's no way for you to tell where that person went within the campus, or to know any analytics about them at all, we did do a very good job on our access controls, the Lyndale access controls are actually pretty well done, except we are not finished with those. And so as part of this process of going into this partnership, if approved, we would be able to replace all of our access controls or cameras, sensors, essentially everything throughout the district. And it would end up costing us less overall than what we're currently spinning. So before we get into the details about finances that just wanted to show you the presentation real quickly, that ricotta had given to us and he kind of goes over what is the system is so you kind of have a better understanding of all the things that will go involved in it. Alright, thank you. So why would you pick ricotta. Currently, right now our system has a point of failure, that point of failure is an NVR or DVR. And what we're continually seeing is our system fails quite often, in certain areas, we have an incident happen at a school, they can't get access to it when they do get access to it, they find out that the DVR is no longer functioning. So moving to a ricotta system. Each camera has its own individual hard drive. It works through the internet on IP address. And so when one goes down, the whole system does not it automatically alert you. And with our 10 year warranty they send you next a replacement for that camera and say your identity you're notified when you have something happen. It also identifies where students are in student locations as well as guest. So when somebody's on campus, you can easily search for a person based off of the color of their shirt, their face or any other recognition along with cameras I mean along with their license plate on vehicles, it will tell you where they are located on your campus. The biggest reason to move to ricotta is the ease of use. Ultimately, you can log on to it Dr. James says the West Ardo camera systems set up on his phone where he can monitor the new system that we put in that also has the sensors in the bathrooms is exceptionally easy for you to get into, to work through and to be able to pass along to those who need it like the police can get onto this very easily without the struggles that they're dealing with. Right now, it's been a good portion of the beginning of this year, working with the sheriff's department to get them all into our system. And it is hit and miss if it's going to work appropriately based off the software. It's also has integrated access with the access controls. So when somebody comes in with the new access controls, it allows you to take a picture of who's walking into the building. You also can have an access control telecom or you can talk back and forth to a person standing outside of the door. So for example, if somebody were to give away their ID card to get into the building to another person, you could actually see who's going through the door as opposed to just notice in that that access card access that door cameras and the hardware have a 10 year warranty, which ours currently does not. And so as part of this partnership, we would be paid And for five years on a 59 month lease purchase, and we would have 10 years of hardware and software agreement that would completely cover the entire system throughout that time. Next slide. Thank you. So a little bit about Mercado, they were founded Intuit 2016. They have 900 employees worldwide. And so as you can see, their system involves environmental sensors, cameras access control. It also includes an alarm system, and ricotta guest, which all work together to help monitor the schools or any building that they're in. Their goal was to create a modern enterprise fiscal security system. And their vision is to protect assets, or people assets and privacy.

So next slide shows you essentially the more upset or up close idea of the products and goes over each individual one, which you guys were provided. So I won't spend a whole lot of time on this. But it is one suite of cloud based solutions. And just so you know, as these things go onto our network, it does not create as much pool as what we're pulling right now. Because when you're trying to pull through the network to do the DVRs, when you go to get pull it back out, you actually create more bandwidth and what these are running on our system. So this is a control total cost of ownership. So what happens is, once you've paid for it, you know how long it's going to last, you know what your license renewals going to be. And you know how the product works. Like I said, we've had several of these already installed throughout our school district, and some of our classrooms and other areas. And once we've had any issues the very few times we've had, we've received the best technical support that you can imagine. And we've also had the the product delivered the very next day, it's very easy to install and very easy to put back up. One of the other unique things that goes along with ricotta is they will actually take your floor plans, they will add them in, we already have several of ours done, it shows you where all the cameras are, it allows you to see through the sensors, where you may have a population of people through heat mapping, it also gives you the ability to determine if areas are being overused what kind of on a cleaning you might want to do there. And it gives you just a lot of analytics that we currently don't have. Next slide is something I was very excited about with ricotta. As you can see, we've got shady guy here, as we've named him checking in the ease to be able to find shady guy, I could just type in person in black shirt, and it's going to show me every person who had a black shirt. Now, that's a very common color for students to wear. But once they check in the ricotta guessed, it not only will tell you where people have a black shirt, but it will tell you where that actual person is located or last seen on camera, you can set it up so that when people come into the school, it will recognize license plates in certain areas where cameras would capture that, and then will automatically notify you if that vehicle does come onto campus, if you so choose to do that. But it has a lot of capabilities that we currently do not have. Next couple of slides just go over the cameras, I did want to let you know that we are going to be selecting or we have selected for the partnership, the CD 62, which does have 136 angle, it's also a 4k camera, it does zoom in which our current cameras don't zoom in. I mean, it gives you quite a bit of zone. So actually, we may not have to use nearly as many cameras due to the larger angle as we would if we would continue with what we currently have. Then the environmental sensors are next which we talked about the last meeting that you temperature TVOC Air Quality Index noise humidity, and I'll skip over a couple of them. But the most popular one with the teenage students is the vape detection.

The access controls can be Bluetooth ready, they do have lockdown features, we can program those so that we can have them come on when the bells go off. The biggest advantage of moving to all access controls which we currently do not have we have access controls at every school, but we do not have access controls to every door. This would provide us to put access controls at every door is we could then more effectively rekey our school district so that we don't have all these extra keys that have been through years of facilities usage out there around. I mean, they're all over the place in some cases. So it would give us the ability to actually truthfully lock those down and be able to rekey just a few select doors that we would need To meet requirements. On the next slide, you see the alarm controls. The advantage of moving to a system like this, which we're currently paying for alarm controls, which this would replace is that this system monitors our schools, if at night, they receive a phone call about something going on, somebody at berkata actually looks over the footage to see what's going on. And they determine whether they need to call the principal right now, what happens is the principal get called at the middle of the night, I've been on on that end several times, and you come out to the school, and you find out it was just the door that was left open or something that set the alarm off, it's very simple, but it will give us the ability for that portion not to be going directly to a school employee, before it actually got reviewed. So they can actually see that something's going on, call 911 If they need to, it's much more fast response than what we currently have. The next slide shows about guest, part of the agreement with the partnership as they will be providing us with iPads stations, for them to check in iPads are warrantied for 10 years along with all other equipment. But it gives us the ability to do role based permissions badges touchless, check in all the things that we currently do when people check into our campus but does not integrate with our security system. So they check in on identity kid. And as I said earlier, when they actually leave identical, all we have as the log that they checked in, we have no idea where they've actually gone. If they choose to go a different place than what they've said in the next couple of slides is just a complete breakdown. So we make sure that we shared all the information with you guys. This is the complete break ground breakdown of equipment, not including the high school cameras that we had already agreed for purchase, which I appreciate you guys doing from the last meeting. So this is everything else to completely finish the entire school district. The next page talks about the scope of work. So in our scope of work, we had a few changes due to the grant that have provided us the high school cameras. So the camera count did go down a little bit, the door access controls did go up some card readers were reduced the guest number of guests check in portals went down, we did increase the number of sensors. And we did add the the alarm hardware into that. And so the price breakdown continues on this page and into the next page. But overall, this system would end up costing the school district over five years $5,729,040 Which would end up being $4,000,138 506 or one $138,562 in savings for just install and the system. So I do feel like this is a great deal. And it's something that I'm encouraging us to explore further. Next page on the presentation talks about just a breakdown appendix just wanted to make sure you guys had the information. And then I'm glad to talk to you about all the other parts that come along with this.

Mr. Howell, Mr. Chairman, it is time. Security is a big issue everywhere today. And I think that it's time that we bite the bullet and go ahead and upgrade what we have. I I'm all for this. I also will tell you guys that I am going to school board sponsored seminar this week, and it is about security. So I'll bring you back anything that I learned from that seminar. Also, Jim, do you know your logo is very similar to one used by a knife company on the West Coast. Check out Benchmade knives and see if your logo the course they have their name in butter, flour the mouth, but check it out. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. McKnight.

The system is impressive, but I've got to ask my contrarian questions. Absolutely. So couple things on the sensors again just on that. The sensors can they be thresholded to alarm when values get above a certain level?

They can be adjusted. Yes, we've already had to adjust the ones that were asked like when you initially put them in, you really don't know. So we've had to go back in and adjust them because they were At one point a little too sensitive, and you just kind of have to find that spot and just use have to get them calibrated in. Yes. It's so easy.

All right, so Ricardo 2016, is that correct? 2016. So looking at the cost savings, and if we go through the four contracts, the 10 years, the cost savings is in year six through 10. Correct? Absolutely. And that is six years out with a company that six years old. So we are betting 10 years on a six year old company. Yes, sir, tell me why I should do that?

Well, because currently, the way that technology is moving, what you're seeing is companies like berkata, are at the leading edge of what we're seeing and changing those things. Ricotta actually has a sole source for their actual product. And so by doing that, they've actually protected their company, much more than what you would see for somebody else who's willing to just get you an IP based camera system by being a sole source. And by being willing to stand behind by 10 years, also giving you the guarantee that they'll replace that product, not only with a newer product, if they're not making that one anymore, is that's that's pretty big words.

Oh, I agree. I just it's, you know, there's some trust involved. Absolutely. This long contract. And we do have an Mr. Lawyer. I do we have outs on standard contracts like these.

So this would be at least purchase contract. And we're currently reviewing them. But yeah, I mean, we would certainly have the ability to terminate for calls

and that as well. Like, I hate to say this company goes under these sorts

of things. Yeah, typically going bankrupt or somebody get bought

out. And then if you bought out contracts, they wouldn't change contracts and stuff like that. Correct.

Any further questions? Mr. Chairman? Just a couple of questions. Like I probably know the answer to this, but does the system have like a door prop alarm? You mentioned in your scenario where you got called the middle of night,

somebody dropped the door open. So this will detect a door prop? Well, I'm gonna defer that to these guys. But I know that if you're once you're, once you've got the doors armed, then you should be able to tell if the door is not properly shut.

Look like the camera that was selected only had a 90 day retention that I read that right?

That is correct. And currently, what we have does not store the footage the entire time, it stores it for a certain amount of days. And then you have the ability to back it up with our DVRs. If it doesn't back it up at a certain time. Plus, right now what we have is our current camera system, a lot of them are motion detected. So if nothing's happening, they're not going to be recording good. This is 24/7 running camera system. And ultimately, when you look at the breakdown, at first, when we enter this partnership, I had told them that I wanted to be able to gather a lot of information to be able to see. So I looked at what we were currently spending and estimated cost of what it would cost for me to replace our whole system as far as going to outreach this if I did it in parts. So going with the partnership was much better, but showing that it was actually going to provide us that much savings, and being able to provide the ability for them to come to the school district as needed with permission as they outline to show others what berkata can do, I think is a big win for us. And it's a mutt, I mean, it's half the cost if you look at it, or let it's less than half. So you're okay with a 90 day retention.

You're good with that real quick. So so that was actually to step up to the mic, step up to the mic so people at home can hear sorry, just to jump in real quick on the 90 days. So what you saw was a slide or the capability of that camera. So what happens is we put hardware in that camera before it shipped out based on what you need for retention. And typically what we see in schools is about 30 days retention from our cameras. So, we can make it up to 90 this proposals 30 day retention, which I believe is probably close to double what you have today. So it will have a continuous 24/7 Like like Mr. Ivey said for 30 days not 9090 We can definitely do it's just the cost of that hardware significantly more expensive. Now your your events are kept forever in the cloud so you can you don't have to worry about that. Just save them as you need them.

I would not recommend going into the 90 camera just it is not necessary for what we have especially with it being backed up or the glade

so did a just quick little internet search and one of the ricotta guys want to comment on it. First ad that comes up is solid link is a better alternative. Address the ad if you would please. I mean, yeah, it's a Google ad. stuff. Yeah, I understand that. But you know if our constituents are going to see this, and I think they may have that question. It's a good one for you guys to answer. Thank you.

So I think you'll find a lot of vendors in the Google ads there when you search for cada, sure. And I'm not familiar with the vendor, but it happens a lot with just all competitive information where when a company like us is kind of doing things differently, you'll find other vendors want to do the same thing. And they want to use Google AdWords to kind of piggyback on that.

So you don't know this company or anything like that you haven't heard? Okay. Okay. I did see you guys have really good funding. I just saw that. Your investment funding,

Dr. Knight that, you know, we did look into this, we didn't just jump in with one understand, like I said, we've used this system, in parts in our district already.

I'm just thinking, if someone's watching this, that might be something they would do. And they might have a question that homes.

Absolutely. And I just wanted to let you and those watching know that this is a system that we have tested out. We've used it. We've actually tried all the bells and whistles to make sure that it does. It's been

at West Iredale, correct High School. And you've we've enjoyed it think it's good work. Good stuff, if you want to call me.

Well, actually, after about the first two days with the sensors, the principal asked if she could have additional help to take care of all the kids that were catching vaping. As it was being installed, the installer actually contacted me. He had installed them, I think the lunch room. Restrooms in the lunch area, he installed there first because they were suspect that's where most vaping was occurring during lunch. And he went to the other end of the building, had the app already on his phone. And he said before he could climb the ladder, the app was going off. And he had to stop and call the principal and say the sensors going off in the restroom you may want to check. And I think there were four or five calls that day. In vaping is becoming a huge problem. I was decided he started middle school today. And principal Walker opened her drawer and pulled out 12 vapes brand name was hide so if you're selling those to our minors, please stop. Hy de so that was this 12 hides. But then there was another brand she had, which is illegal to sell to minors. But at middle school, so our principals are saying it's one of their number one issues they're having the problem is they're not vaping just tobacco products.

Yep. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Davi helped me explain, understand rather the purchase and lease lease to purchase. So first five years, 59 months, we're going to pay the cost is outlined here. Okay, so year six through 10. We had no cost, we purchase it for the $1 at the end of the 59 months? That's correct. Okay. What then are the any cost in the year six through 10 for the service, the maintenance or license fee? No, sir. And who will maintain the system in year six through 10.

So currently, right now we have techs who do that on that are our techs in the maintenance department, they install the access controls the cameras and keep up with them. Once the system is installed, anytime you have any issues, then you have their tech support, which would be if you need to reach out to them which that's stoning. And we have reached out to him multiple times as we've been installing the vapes. Part of their services is white gloves. So they will be providing us with one year white glove. But to get to your six to 10. Once you put in the camera camera goes down, it is almost as easy as taking the camera off and putting the new one on and then being calibrated and turned on. So it is very much more easy for us to maintain

and upkeep school system will maintain it. Six three teams will still

have their service part of their licensing agreements will still have they will still help us they will still have technical support the same as we would if we were to buy a one year license on it.

The other question that I had was, in your first page, you gave us installation cost of between 400,500 1000 Is that in addition to the 5.7 mi,

that is not included in that price? Because when we have to install these cameras, they're IP based. What we currently have now is analog. So you have to add switches, internet switches, and that's what we would be at Adding, and that's what that cost is, is for Internet switches and cabling. And so

add approximately if if we do get $130,000 rebate and you take the forfeit $400,050, then what we would have is to add $320,000 to total cost,

yes. And we're currently spending and when you're going to upgrade your network, you're having to upgrade some of these things already. So some of this cost is going to be shared, amongst other projects that's working through the network, because that is a big project that Dr. James asks.

And is there any I asked you this question last month? Is there any plan at all to expand the cameras to the parking lot?

Yes, there is. It's not part of this, because we wanted to take care of what we have. But please know, we already have cameras that already are pointed out toward the parking lot, this would actually give us a larger range, we did have a conversation with berkata, about being able to set up pointing to points when we get that to our stadiums, and be able to broadband or shoot some internet access out into farther into the parking lot. You could actually put up some wireless cameras on places

and within some of the stadiums.

Yes, sir, that we did have that conversation with our weekly meeting with him. I'll say just want to make sure you noted that it monarch did submit the lowest bid and if selected, and if approved, they're the ones who are going to be providing us with $130,000 of help with installation. What that would include is they would actually send somebody from monarch to come in and do that portion of installation, we as a school district would decide where we wanted them to go for their time, that would equal out $130,000.

Did you talk at all about when we might have the parking lots in the stadiums?

Well, it's going to take us approximately one year to get all of this installed in our school district. And as soon as that's done, we would begin working on that part. But many of our parking lots are already added. And as we're going along, if we ended up with additional cameras, we can't add those in places. So we have had that conversation about press boxes being able to add them there, since some of those will have internet as part of the internet upgrade. Thank you.

Shoemaker, did you have All right. Any any other questions? For Mr. Ivey? All right, then moving on, if you could just give us Sorry, I was gonna ask him to

let me ask one quick question. With the situation in the world right now. Shortage of chips being a major, major issue. What does that look like with you guys? And Are y'all running into that yet? And we're expecting to run into that?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that we're I think all businesses right now are struggling with that challenge. I think, from what I see, in the short term, we look okay. For example, the cameras that we just sent out for the high schools, they had a delay of a couple of weeks, which was due to the delay. So my thought is that we gave a little bit of a buffer in there. through July, I think it was to get the camera equipment here, because we think it's going to be a couple week delay because of manufacturing challenges. I can say berkata overall is doing a really good job of managing that challenge right now. It's just a matter of getting stuff shipped here. So now we're flying everything in. We're not even doing freight via boat anymore, because it's not reliable. So to answer your question, by the time, the expectation is there, our goal is to have everything you need. Thank you.

The cameras we that you guys approved already are already here. So