Customer: St Joseph’s Roman Catholic High School
Location: Horwich, Bolton, Greater Manchester
Requirement: The school had a growing concern over the use of vapes by students and the health impacts they posed. In one incident several students had needed hospital treatment after using contaminated vapes – including one who stopped breathing for a period of time.
Solution: Ecl-ips has supplied 24 Halo Smart Sensors, manufactured in the USA by IPVideo Corporation, these are managed using Halo Cloud.
Services: We pre-staged and supplied the Halo Smart Sensors, which the school installed and Ecl-ips provided training as needed.
Customer’s View:
“Our sensors are really smart; they can measure whether …the vape has been laced with THC. We’ve picked up ..quite a few vapes that seem to have traces of THC.”
St Joseph’s is a well-established Catholic secondary school in Horwich, Bolton, Greater Manchester. The school has a strong Christian ethos and endeavours to ensure that each young person is able to achieve their full potential in terms of spiritual, intellectual and physical development, in a secure and safe environment.
The environment of the school has been unsettled in recent years by the rising levels of vaping by students, a problem it shares with others in the UK.
“There is a problem nationally,” said Mr McCabe, headteacher. He added:
“It’s a new pandemic that will grow unless we make enough noise… to make sure that young people are not at the centre of that market.”
The school noticed that despite having a large number of toilet cubicles there seemed to be an ever-increasing level of demand for them. Lessons were being disrupted as more students asked to use the toilets during this time. When this was investigated further it was clear this was due to children using the toilets to vape. Additionally, there were incidents when some students have suffered severe side effects, these were found to be linked to the use of counterfeit vapes.
These incidents and the increase in the number of students vaping meant the school sought to understand how they could support them. They approached Ecl-ips to supply them with Halo Smart Sensors. The school has gradually increased the number of sensors it has to ensure all students are protected. Now it has 24 devices it also uses HALO Cloud which provides a dashboard to see real-time alerts as well as historical data.
The HALO Smart Sensor is a power over ethernet (POE) device which means it receives its data and power over a single Cat5e ethernet cable so connecting it up and getting started is simple. Ecl-ips has well-established expertise in data cabling so we can do this as well as the installation. However, if customers can do the cabling we can just come and install the HALO Smart Sensor, or Ecl-ips will also supply only as we have done for St Joseph’s. Ecl-ips will set up the HALO Smart Sensor, including ensuring the latest firmware is always up to date and that all the requirements for detection are set up correctly. Then we can train and support customers remotely if required.
The HALO Smart Sensor has a tamper detection which will alert you to problems such as students trying to interfere with the device and has an IK10 vandal-resistance rating. Additionally, its aggression detection feature means the HALO detects abnormal noise levels. Separately, with five key words pre-programmed, the device can notify staff of calls for help.
Like other schools St Joseph’s has installed a CCTV camera outside the toilets so they can identify those seen leaving and match up the footage of the students with the vaping alert data received from the Halo sensors.
Ecl-ips has been providing security solutions, in particular CCTV, to schools for over a decade and the HALO smart sensor is a useful addition to its product range for support monitoring in schools. When the vape detectors were initially installed at St Joseph’s they were activated 112 times. This has now vastly reduced, but it has not been eliminated. The school is finding that there are 11-year-olds starting at the school who already have a vape addiction.
Mr McCabe said:
“It still surprises me that young people know there’s a vape sensor in our toilet cubicles, they know they’re going to be picked up for it, and yet they still do it.”
This means, he said, that they have an addiction. The school, therefore, has chosen not to punish students but instead offers ongoing support to students and their families to educate them about the dangers of vaping and to combat the addiction.
Result: The HALO Smart Sensors are reducing the level of vaping at the school and allowing the school to identify those that need support to stop vaping.
Benefits: The school is identifying students that need help and is able to improve the school environment so lessons are less disrupted.
Download a copy of the St Joseph’s Roman Catholic High School Case Study PDF
Media Coverage of the Halo Smart Sensors at St Joseph’s RC High School
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/bolton-school-attracts-international-attention-050000812.html
https://youtu.be/12W6tAPlTiU (This Morning YouTube channel)