GRANADA – Operating under previous approval, the Granada-Huntley-East Chain (GHEC) School Board approved a bid from Alpha Wireless to install cameras in all classrooms during their meeting on Thursday.

Superintendent Doug Storbeck said they received approval from teachers two years ago to install the cameras, but paused it due to the potential building project they were planning to put to a referendum.

“Now that we’re to that point, we’d like to move forward with updating our camera system,” he said.

The school district received four bids. Alpha Wireless was the best offer at around $80,000. Bevcomm had a better price, but it wasn’t what the district was looking for.

“That was really just going to be minor upgrades to our current system and nothing significant,” he said.

The price had originally been around $70,000 when the bid first came in last summer, but after a more thorough review of the building, Alpha Wireless settled on its final price. Board Member J.D. Goraczkowski asked if this price included installation. Storbeck said it did, and not all of the bids included that.

Board Chair Jessica Salic asked if these are intended to work the same as their hallway cameras work right now. Storbeck said they do and have some pretty significant upgrades.

“A lot of these cameras have the AI capabilities of tracking a certain description from one camera to the next,” he said. “You can actually see faces and stuff. You can zoom in without losing the resolution.”

By having these cameras in the classroom, Storbeck said it will help when they need to investigate and determine next moves in certain situations.

“Unfortunately, we do have situations that happen in the classroom, and we as administrators have to do a lot of investigating just to figure out what actually did happen,” he said. “Having camera access will kind of eliminate that investigation, or at least reduce it, because we’ll have visual evidence of what actually happened in class.”

Storbeck also hopes students will be more mindful of their actions as a result of camera implementation.

“I feel that the students themselves will be a little bit more accountable in their actions within the classrooms,” he said. “Because they do know where the cameras are in the building and if they know that there is somebody watching them, they might mind their Ps and Qs.”

Safety has also been taken into consideration with the implementation of these cameras.

“They’re on our own individual servers,” Storbeck said. “The safety and security is the same that we would have with our current camera system. Only certain people have access to the camera systems. Our intent is only to utilize the cameras if we need to look at a potential disciplinary situation.”

The board unanimously approved the bid from Alpha Wireless to purchase cameras from them.

In other business, Storbeck said they are currently looking at some repairs for underneath their Ag and Shop area due to water loss.

“We’re losing 300 gallons of water a day,” Storbeck said. “The pipes, basically, they’re not returning with the water back.”

Building and Grounds Director LJ Maidl said it is something that’s going to have to get done this summer, so next year they can save on water.

The board also discussed the plan to split up sixth grade into separate sections. It has continued to move forward as the school moves to finish the master schedule for next year.

“It allows our middle school teachers to provide more individualized instruction and provide academic support and assistance more quickly,” Storbeck said.

“I would anticipate keeping this approach with incoming sixth-grade students,” he said. “The tentative plan is to have our sixth-grade students have an elective where students work on and develop their executive functioning skills. That’s task initiation, organization and prioritization.”