Key Benefits

Meet Adam Neely at Prescott High School

Adam is the Principal at Prescott High School in Prescott, AZ. With approximately 1,500 students at its current size, the school has been a staple of both the district and the community for 120 years. The school’s mission is to provide a safe and supportive environment that fosters a comprehensive education for all students so that they may reach their full potential. 

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In addition to Volt.ai, Prescott High School utilizes some of the following tools as part of their school safety plans: they employ a school resource officer, have a state-funded silent alarm system, and had security cameras in place prior to outfitting them with Volt.ai software.

The Challenges of Reactive Campus Safety Management

Adam, and the team at Prescott, happened upon Volt.ai through a local connection. Interested by the feature set, and looking for a more proactive approach to school safety than any other tools on the market had offered him, he decided to pilot Volt.ai’s intelligent video surveillance software to see how it could help him further the school’s mission to provide the safest environment possible for students.

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“In all my time as a principal, assistant principal, and even as a teacher I felt like we were constantly chasing our tails, everything we did with regard to student safety was reactive. Using Volt.ai was the first time I really have been able to get out ahead of things that are happening proactively.”

• Adam Neely, Principal, Prescott High School

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What he found was nothing short of extraordinary. Adam, and the rest of the school administrators at Prescott High School, now have unprecedented insight into what is happening on their campus the instant it is happening. They can react in real-time and respond to events immediately, preventing harmful safety situations in a way they’d never been able to before.

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"This is the first time where I really have been able to be out ahead of things that are happening. I'm not just using my cameras for investigation, I'm using them for immediate action and response which is pretty special."

• Adam Neely, Principal, Prescott High School

Raising School Safety Standards: The Benefits of Volt.ai

The team at Prescott High School have found numerous benefits from using Volt.ai’s technology. Some of these they expected, and some they didn’t.

Immediate Awareness

The most important benefit for Adam and his team has been immediate awareness of things that they’ve never before been able to monitor. The system sends immediate notifications to designated members of school personnel's devices (including smartwatches) when it detects potential issues, making it easier than ever to monitor school security.

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Triggers that have proven helpful in minimizing school safety issues:

• Person down detection: Ability to identify and alert staff when someone is on the ground, potentially in distress.
• Weapon detection: Volt.ai’s technology is capable of identifying threats from weapons, including when they're held at a person's side, and if desired contact law enforcement automatically.
• Fight detection: School staff can tell immediately when a fight has broken out or recognize an incident of bullying and respond immediately instead of retro-actively, keeping school violence to a minimum.
• Prevention of unwanted Access: Customized rules allow the staff to detect unwanted access during specific times or at specific locations that have helped detect theft and other undesirable activities.
• Crowd detection: Ability to identify unusual crowd buildups in hallways or other areas to alert to a potential issue that needs immediate addressing.
• Customizable emergency management rules: The customization of rules, including which staff members to notify about which events, or even when to automatically notify law enforcement allows Prescott High School to enact their own unique strategy for security and safety, fitting the needs of their campus. 

Some specific examples of improved school safety that Prescott High has seen in action:

• Person down detection: This particular feature has helped identify a student in distress, suffering from an asthma attack while in a hallway with no staff present. Nurse response was available to the student within 15 seconds due to the immediate notification to staff.
• Weapon detection: While, thankfully, no incidents have occurred with real weapons, the wooden rifles used by the school’s ROTC unit are all immediately recognized, a fascinating test of this important feature.
• Unwanted access: This feature has helped detect theft of equipment immediately and allowed fast action; in addition to catching loitering and cases of students being present in areas of the school grounds that they shouldn’t be.
• Crowd detection: This feature has helped compound the support of the fight detection feature to identify fights or incidents occurring in areas where cameras cannot be present (like locker rooms) by detecting the formation and movement of large crowds toward those areas, allowing staff to break up fights in a matter of seconds.
• Fight detection: This feature allows staff to break up fights, while they may happen infrequently, significantly faster than prior to having access to the technology.

Signal to Noise Ratio

To date, nearly every alert, while it may not signal a life or death situation, has been useful information for Adam and his team to manage the campus. They do not suffer from “notification overload” and have benefited greatly from learning new information from each alert.

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"Everything that pops up for me is at least knowledge of something happening on my campus and to me that's useful. I don't get anything where I check the alert and realize that the system is trying to flag something that is not what it thinks it is."

• Adam Neely, Principal, Prescott High School

Privacy for Students 

Because the system is looking for anomalous behavior, and does not use facial recognition to track individuals in any way, it has maintained the privacy it is important to provide students. 

The system can track individuals based on gait and movement without using facial recognition, looking for concerning activities but never looks for individuals. This particular feature has helped to ensure parents, and the community at large, are comfortable with the use of the technology.

Great Partners Today, and into the Future

Needless to say, Prescott High School and Volt.ai will work together to maintain and continue to improve school safety standards for years to come. 

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"I've just been pleased with the way they've taken care of me and how responsive they’ve been to my requests. They've continued to look out for whatever my current needs or questions, or whatever it happened to be."

• Adam Neely, Principal, Prescott High School