By Ben Rodgers
Editor
DE PERE – The De Pere school board learned about a plan to spend nearly $240,000 in grant money on security cameras at a Monday, April 1, finance committee meeting.
The proposal calls for the district to use a grant of up to $247,948 from the Wisconsin Department of Justice to upgrade and enhance security cameras at all district buildings.
The funds come from a $100 million pool, approved by the state Legislature to upgrade school safety across Wisconsin.
Eric Piepenburg, director of technology, worked with building administration and school resource officer Brian Arkens to discuss potential camera locations.
Piepenburg also obtained 14 bids that contained six different software platforms from five different vendors.
“There’s a good amount of difference in some of the overall design philosophies,” Piepenburg said. “Some vendors wanted to tile panoramic cameras, but they didn’t have cameras that met certain criteria. One of the tools in the proposal was the cloud-based solution that looked really good on paper and it was priced accordingly, but there were only four camera models.”
In the end, administration recommended awarding the project to Camera Corner Connecting Point at a cost just under $240,000.
That includes 132 new cameras, three years of licensing/support, reusing some of the district’s existing 44 cameras, full turnkey installation of all hardware and end-user training on the Milestone software.
“Milestone definitely struck us as the best ease-of-use while still having a nice feature set,” Piepenburg said.
Some of the features include the ability to track a person with footage from different cameras, the ability to focus on an area when there is movement, the ability for the police department to view footage remotely, and 30 of days storage for footage.
Piepenburg said the recurring license fee is positive because the software will continue to improve.
“One of the advantages with the license is they are constantly upgrading the platform and the features along with it,” he said.
The district will also put new cameras in the high school gym and auditorium, as well as an enhanced-zoom camera in the high school parking lot.
The parking lot camera will also be able to record black and white footage during the night.
“We reached a point with our current equipment that 30 days is a struggle to get and it’s not capable to add any more cameras to it,” Piepenburg said. “So with the grant money available, we decided a fully-overhauled system was what’s needed instead of adding to the system we already have.”
From a security standpoint, Piepenburg said the district wants to monitor main spaces and keep an eye on all entrances and exits.
The school board will likely vote on the proposal at an upcoming meeting.
In other news, the curriculum committee discussed school days where recess was held indoors due to cold temperatures.
The De Pere school district has a cutoff of -10 degrees with the wind chill for when to bring students inside.
Superintendent Ben Villarruel informed the committee that on eight days this school year, students had indoor recess.
Those do not include days where school was cancelled due to Arctic temperatures or days when recess was moved inside due to ice on the pavement.
Villarruel said there were four days where the wind chill was between that -10 and zero mark where students could have been moved outdoors.
Dickinson Elementary School Principal Luke Herlache said moving students indoors presents challenges for educators.
“Obviously, 40 kids in a classroom playing, there’s going to be some consequences to that,” Herlache said.
No change on the indoor recess policy was presented.