K-12 team modernizes campus safety, moving from antiquated cameras to cloud AI with instant search.
Customer Snapshot:
✅ Customer: Salem High School
✅ Industry: K–12 Education
✅ Use Case: Replace outdated cameras; speed up investigations; strengthen campus safety
✅ Segment: Schools / District Safety
“It’s revolutionized the way that we keep this campus safe.” Assistant Principal Bonnie Reedy says the shift to Coram has also made her job “a lot easier,” replacing slow, manual video review with fast, AI-assisted searches.
Before Coram (Challenge)
The school’s system was “not what I would consider smart at all. No AI… and then just really antiquated.” A major campus expansion left legacy cameras behind the curve, and day-to-day inquiries—where a student or item went, what happened in a hallway—took far too long to investigate. Leadership needed a modern platform that could keep pace with a larger footprint and today’s safety expectations.
The Switch to Coram
The team explored options but found Coram’s product and support “the best option.” A pivotal draw was Coram’s ability to replace aging cameras alongside licenses. Once they demoed Coram, one capability stood out: Discover. “Instead of spending… a couple hours looking for a needle in a haystack, I can simply do it with a few words and it’s… almost instantaneous.” Coram also brought Journeyman and critical alerts, including weapons detection, aligning with the school’s safety priorities.
Life With Coram (Results)
Reedy keeps Coram live on a big-screen TV for passive awareness, then pivots to rapid search for investigations. After rollout, neighboring divisions visited to see the system in action; the school also presented to its board on time savings and safety gains.
- Before: Antiquated, non-AI cameras; time-consuming manual look-backs.
- After: Always-on visibility, instant AI search for people/items, and critical alerts that prompted a clear response plan.
Adopting advanced alerts led to policy refinement. “We… had to kind of review our own policies and procedures of how we’re going to respond,” Reedy notes, underscoring that better tech triggered stronger protocols—not complacency.
On everyday impact, the verdict is unequivocal: “It’s revolutionized the way that we keep this campus safe. And it’s made my job a lot easier… it has saved me a tremendous amount of time.”
Why Coram?
- Instant investigations: Discover turns hours of scrubbing into minutes with natural-language search.
- Proactive safety: Journeyman and critical alerts (including weapons) align to school safety needs.
- Modernization built-in: Camera replacement paired with licenses accelerated the upgrade.
- Ease and advocacy: Product + support team “the best option,” easy to show and explain to stakeholders.
- Everyday usability: Passive live monitoring with rapid drill-down when questions arise.
What’s Next
The high school began as the division’s highest-need site. “After this year we’ll roll it out to our other [campuses]… the entire division,” Reedy says.
Recommendation
“Absolutely. …We show every teacher that’s interested… It’s revolutionized the way that we keep this campus safe… and heaven forbid we ever have a major event… just knowing it’s there is a lot of peace of mind.”
