LCSD to add, upgrade outdated cameras after safety discussions

The Lyon County School District will be adding more surveillance cameras to its campuses as a means of enhancing its safety system and situational awareness in emergencies.

District officials in its operations department also will work to update outdated systems in Silver Springs and Smith Valley, Superintendent Wayne Workman told the Nevada Appeal.

Harman Bains, executive director of operations for LCSD, returned during the board’s December meeting and updated the Lyon school board about the district’s safety system. The system includes 1,340 cameras, with 753 present outside of classrooms along perimeters, hallways and common areas, and 587 within classrooms via its Audio Enhancement SAFE (signal alert for education) system.

The Audio Enhancement SAFE system serves as an alert and notification strategy to allow teachers and classrooms to communicate with first responders in an emergency. School sites can review from 60 to 90 days of footage. Of Lyon’s 18 sites, 15 have upgraded their systems within the past five years while the other three have modernized theirs within the past 10 years.

“There is still additional need for cameras as campuses grow and kids realize where the blind spots are,” Bains said.

Lyon’s Board of Trustees initially asked in October for more information about its current system after hearing a presentation from Pennsylvania company ZeroEyes. The startup included a team of Navy SEALs, law enforcement and former military members who use artificial intelligence for visual gun detection in situational awareness and integrate their knowledge into existing digital security cameras to stop mass shootings.

ZeroEyes Director of State and Local Education Solutions Anessa Alderman, Lyon County Sheriff Central Patrol Cmdr. Jeff Miller and Trustee Tom Hendrix, who first asked about reviewing the status of single-point entry projects in the district’s high schools, gave the October presentation.

ZeroEyes, which works in real time with a school’s existing infrastructure and cameras, helps to identify when a gun is brandished anywhere on campus outside or inside a building, Alderman said.

“When we get the alert for brandished guns, we have three to five seconds to determine if it is a real threat or a false positive,” Alderman said. “If it is a real threat, we are going to contact local enforcement and provide them with key pieces of information: who is the gunman, what they look like and what type of gun they have and provide the geolocation and where the threat is coming from.”

ZeroEyes founder Michael Lahiff started the company after the February 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Fla.

Miller of the LCSO said his curiosity about a company like ZeroEyes and its services is using them to help improve his office’s response times to a school’s incident or active situation. In a rural district like Lyon where schools are distant and school resource officers available to respond in active situations or priority areas, “lag time” is a need.

“If we can find out the moment that somebody comes on campus with a gun and we can be here within three to five minutes, we can be here before the shooting starts,” Miller told the board. “Best case scenario, we’ve got four of us in Silver Springs. Everybody and their brothers are coming from all over the county, unless we get more cops and that’s not on you guys.”

In a follow-up with Sheriff Brad Pope, who provided the Appeal with the latest data on the LCSO’s response times, Pope said the department has been able to reduce its average response rate for most priority school zones to eight minutes from 2022 to 2023, with most about one minute quicker. He added there are now three SROs but said the department will be adding a fourth for the 2024-25 school year with one being promoted to sergeant and will be replaced.

The board accepted Bains’ report in December. In a follow-up with the Appeal, Workman said the district would be required to go out to bid to collect information on all other companies since ZeroEyes is not offering AI monitoring services to the district at this point.

LCSO SCHOOL PATROL ZONE        2022          2023

Fernley Priority 1         0:26:30      0:10:06

Fernley Priority 2         0:36:04      0:12:13

Fernley Priority 3         0:42:44      0:17:59

Silver Springs Priority 1                 0:26:51      0:13:50

Silver Springs Priority 2                 0:37:30      0:15:44

Silver Springs Priority 3                 1:02:58      0:20:14

Dayton Priority 1         0:35:23      0:8:46

Dayton Priority 2         0:28:22      0:13:07

Dayton Priority 3         0:37:57      0:16:11

Walker River Priority 1                  0:29:30      0:9:59

Walker River Priority 2                  0:25:57      0:16:13

Walker River Priority 3                  0:35:46      0:22:23

*Times provided in HH(hour):MM(minute):SC(second)

Courtesy Lyon County Sheriff’s Office