With 73 schools serving nearly 42,000 students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, the Caddo Parish Public School District in Shreveport, Louisiana realized it faced numerous challenges to sufficiently secure and monitor campus activity to keep students and faculty safe.

With the campuses and buildings averaging 60 years old — and not originally designed with security in mind — the district turned to Stanley Security Solutions to develop and implement a system combining access control, video surveillance and central station monitoring capabilities to integrate the middle and high schools district-wide, ensuring that each campus environment would be equally protected.

“I personally believe that you can’t have great education without great infrastructure,” said Dr. Gerald Dawkins, superintendent for the Caddo Parish Public School District. “Part of that infrastructure requires that you have safety features — whether its lights, cameras, points of entry — making sure the students are safe and able to experience an excellent education within these great facilities.”

In the district-wide installation, Stanley configured each and every system to meet the individual challenges of the different campuses, which spanned urban, suburban and rural settings and included both single- and multi-level structures. Throughout, Caddo Parish Public School officials were impressed with Stanley’s ability to listen to the administration’s specific input on how to meet the schools’ crucial security needs.

“By pinpointing the problem areas on campus, Stanley was able to work very closely with our Assistant Principal of Discipline to make sure that when they installed the cameras and systems, it was those specific areas that received special attention,” said Dr. Karon Rankin-Manning, principal at Huntington High School.

Stanley installed the system with the scalability to upgrade, so that the campuses could become adaptable to the ever-changing and increasingly significant security concerns of a school setting.

“We’re quite pleased with where we are right now. The follow-up has been great. The contact, the training, the installation…everything has been great to this point. We expect it to be the same way (going forward),” Dawkins continued. “All credit to Stanley as well as to our outstanding team of individuals here at the district.”