Bay District School System in Panama City, Fl. is enhancing its security and will be adding new officers, police cars, 24-hour campus surveillance and a half-dozen M16s, the Panama City News Herald reported.
“We suffered a lot of burglaries this summer,” Mike Jones, safety and security chief for the district, told the Panama City News Herald. “They did tens of thousands of dollars of damage to our schools.”
The district’s security capabilities have increased substantially, and it now employs two full-time officers and eight part-timers who float between 18 elementary school campuses each day.
In addition, the security department, which is housed at the district’s transportation complex has been enhanced so that it has a meeting room that is attached to a surveillance headquarters with 10, 50-inch monitors that streaming live footage from school security and traffic cameras throughout the city, according to the Panama City News Herald.
“Now if you commit a crime on our campuses we can go back 30 days, whereas before we could only go back three days,” according to Jones.
There are also plans to add perimeter cameras to high schools in the district, and eventually more fencing and electronic gates.
