How Washington County Community College Traded Reactive Campus Safety for Real-Time Awareness with Coram
Campus incidents found in seconds
Alerts and doors managed from a phone
Zero reliability issues with lockdowns
The Washington County Community College story
A Small Campus Running Safety Across Three Disconnected Systems
Washington County Community College (WCCC) has served Maine's easternmost county since 1969. Its 400-acre campus sits on a hillside in Calais, looking across the St. Croix River at New Brunswick, and about 145 students live on campus in apartment-style residence halls. Campus safety falls to Dr. Tyler Stoldt, Dean of Enrollment Management and Student Services, whose job covers the entire student experience. On a small campus, everyone wears many hats. Before Coram, Tyler worked across three separate systems for cameras, access control and lockdown, and emergency alerting. Viewing footage meant connecting through a VPN or plugging into the network on campus, and the camera system had no AI at all.The breaking point came when the college's emergency alerting software was discontinued. The daily cost, though, was investigations. People reporting a stolen wallet or laundry missing from the campus apartments rarely know when it happened, so someone had to scrub hours of footage by hand and rely on a fuzzy memory of the timeline.
The Solution
A Search for Alerting Software That Became a Full Platform
As a state institution, WCCC evaluates every vendor it can before spending taxpayer dollars. Tyler went looking for a new alerting tool he could bolt onto the existing cameras and access control. What he found was one connected platform.
- One-Touch Emergency Alerts: Faculty and staff trigger alerts from a phone or computer.
- Custom Alert Actions: Each alert can lock doors, notify campus, or reach only the critical incident team.
- Gun Detection: AI watches every camera for firearms, around the clock.
- One Vendor, One Support Team: Video, access control, and emergency alerts all come from Coram.
{{quote-banner-1}}
The Benefits
From Scrubbing Footage to Asking a Question
Coram is now where Tyler runs campus safety day to day, and much of that work happens on his phone.
- Search in Plain Language: Type "laundry baskets" and see every basket on campus in seconds.
- Run Deep Investigations: Check a reported bear across every camera, with each step of the reasoning shown.
- Troubleshoot Doors Remotely: Ask which doors are open, then check the cameras for a propped door or a bad sensor.
- Manage Doors From Anywhere: Change schedules and overrides without a VPN or remote desktop.
- Reach Every Student: Send alerts to Rave through the Common Alerting Protocol, so students get texts, emails, and calls.
Tyler first wanted to keep the college's own access control and integrate it. Moving everything onto Coram turned out to be one of the best decisions the college has made, with no lockdown reliability problems since. The biggest change is posture. Tyler can see who was on campus at 2 a.m. before anyone files a report, whether that's a student in an allowed space or one who may need help.
{{quote-banner-2}}
When it comes to campus safety, that is where one vendor says, well, it was that integration that didn't work. Another vendor says, well, it wasn't me, it was them. We can't have that when it's a life safety product.
You can always have less time spent on technology and more time spent with the students and with faculty and staff. And that is the biggest benefit of Coram.
