Key Results
17 schools
District-wide camera and sensor deployment underway across LESD79 campuses10,000+ students, ~1,300 staff
Supported across LESD79’s Pre-K–8 school community1,631 cameras and 370 air quality sensors
Installed district-wide to strengthen visibility and environmental monitoringHalf a day to 15 minutes
Time to gather facts and establish an incident timeline reduced in one recent investigation~1 hour
Training needed to get school administrators and staff comfortable using Verkada Command
“Verkada has become a force multiplier for us. It gives administrators and staff the visibility they need to investigate incidents thoroughly and support safer campuses every day.”
Thomas Foster-De-Oro, District Director of Safety and Security, Litchfield Elementary School District #79
A Proactive Approach to School Safety
For Litchfield Elementary School District #79, safety is not a reactive function — it is a district-wide priority. Serving students, staff, families, and visitors across its campuses, LESD79’s Safety and Security Department is responsible for everything from securing district assets and supporting emergency planning to developing new protocols that help ensure everyone goes home safe at the end of the day.
That proactive mindset is reflected across the district’s safety program: ongoing safety drills, staff training, Standard Response Protocol (SRP) practices, and close collaboration with local law enforcement partners across Avondale, Buckeye, Goodyear, and Litchfield Park.
It is also reflected in the district’s approach to campus assessments. Under the leadership of Thomas Foster-De-Oro, District Director of Safety and Security, LESD79 has leaned into CPTED — Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design — to identify vulnerabilities and improve safety across its schools.
“This is the only district I’ve been part of, in the decade I’ve been in education and school safety, that has taken such a proactive approach to assessing its sites,” said Foster-De-Oro. “When we walk campuses, we’re looking at things like fence lines, door locks, and other safety considerations. Visibility is one of those areas.”
As the district evaluated its physical security posture, Foster-De-Oro partnered with Ruben Montoya, Director of Information Technology at LESD79, to modernize video security and air quality monitoring across campuses. Together, they looked for a system that would be easy for school teams to use, simple for IT to manage, and flexible enough to support the district’s future safety needs.
Modernizing Visibility Across Campuses
Before Verkada, LESD79 had cameras in place, but the system was older and not always easy for school teams to access or use. Camera placement also needed to be revisited as part of the district’s broader campus safety assessments.
“We were able to see when incidents happened, but the system wasn’t as user-friendly,” said Montoya. “With Verkada, we can give appropriate access to the school teams who need it, while still keeping management centralized and secure.”
For Montoya, who oversees the technology side of the deployment, the district needed a platform that would improve visibility without adding unnecessary complexity for IT.
“We wanted something reliable and easy to support — a system our school teams could use confidently without adding complexity for IT,” he said.
That ease of management was especially important as LESD79 planned a district-wide rollout across 17 schools. With Verkada Command, Montoya’s team can manage cameras and users from a centralized cloud-based platform, while using Active Directory to simplify authentication and access management.
“When users leave the district, I don’t have to remember to manually turn off camera access,” Montoya said. “We disable them in Active Directory, and they lose access to the cameras.”
For the safety team, Verkada offered something equally important: a way to extend visibility at a time when schools are being asked to do more with limited resources.
“Like many districts, we’re constantly looking for ways to be more strategic with the resources we have,” said Foster-De-Oro. “At the same time, schools still need to maintain visibility into potential issues like fighting, vaping, and other student behaviors. Verkada helps give our teams that added layer of visibility.”
Verkada’s cameras and air quality sensors help bridge that gap by giving administrators, school safety officers, and front office teams faster access to the context they need.
Detecting Vaping While Protecting Student Privacy
In addition to video security, LESD79 deployed Verkada Air Quality Sensors to help address vaping on campus — particularly among older elementary and middle school students.
“One of the negative behaviors we’re dealing with among students right now is vaping,” said Foster-De-Oro. “The air quality sensors help us mitigate those behaviors and occurrences.”
The sensors quickly helped validate what some students had already been reporting.
“I think our principals would say they didn’t realize they had a problem until we got the sensors,” Foster-De-Oro said. “Students would say, ‘The upper grades are vaping in the bathroom,’ or describe a smell. By the time an administrator got there to investigate, they couldn’t smell anything, or it smelled like bubble gum.”
With Verkada Air Quality Sensors, school teams can receive alerts when vaping is detected. When paired with nearby cameras positioned outside privacy-sensitive areas such as bathrooms, administrators can review hallway footage to understand who entered or exited around the time of an alert — helping them respond faster while maintaining student privacy.
“With the sensors, we can get to the scene faster,” said Foster-De-Oro. “When we pair the sensors with cameras, we can better understand who was in the area, respond appropriately, and use those moments as opportunities for intervention. At the end of the day, it’s about supporting student wellness and keeping kids safe.”
A Unified Platform That Works for Safety and IT
For LESD79, having cameras and sensors on a single platform was a major advantage. Rather than managing multiple disconnected systems, district and school teams can use Verkada Command as a centralized platform for video, sensor events, alerts, and user access.
“It comes down to ease of use,” said Montoya. “As much as we might want to mix and match systems, we didn’t want to create friction between technologies. Verkada works smoothly together.”
That simplicity has helped drive adoption across campuses. The primary day-to-day users include principals, assistant principals, front office staff, student advisors, behavioral coaches, instructional coaches, psychologists, school safety officers, and school resource officers.
Once a campus installation is complete, Montoya and his project manager provide a brief training for school teams. The session typically covers how to navigate the dashboard, archive video, view multisensor cameras, zoom in on fisheye views, and access Command from a computer, phone, or iPad.
“It’s usually about an hour overview,” said Montoya. “But even before we arrive, because we give them access when the cameras are up, they already know how to log in. They’re firing questions at us.”
That usability has been one of the most consistent points of feedback from school leaders.
“The feedback I’m getting from principals and schools is, ‘Wow, this is so easy to use,’” Montoya said. “The camera quality is outstanding, and the schools are very happy with this new, intuitive system.”
Faster Investigations with Objective Video Evidence
One of the biggest benefits of Verkada has been the ability to resolve investigations faster and with greater confidence.
For school teams, incidents often require gathering witness statements, building a timeline, and determining what happened before any follow-up action can be taken. With Verkada, administrators can quickly review relevant footage, verify details, and respond with more complete information.
In one recent case involving the release of a student to a non-custodial parent, Foster-De-Oro said the investigation process changed dramatically. “Normally, we would have to track down everyone involved, get witness statements, figure out what time the parent came in, what time the nurse signed the student out, who made the call, and so on,” he said. “That would usually take about half a day before we could respond to the parent, set up a meeting, and have the facts.”
Using Verkada, the team was able to verify the timeline in about 15 minutes.
“I could quickly establish when the student went to the nurse, when the nurse released the student to the front office, and when the parent came in,” Foster-De-Oro said. “It took about 15 minutes to gather what I needed for the parent meeting and understand where we needed to improve.”
For Montoya, that speed also translates into less time spent by IT searching for and exporting video.
“With Verkada, you tell me what happened and give me a 20- or 30-minute window, and I can find the footage quickly,” he said. “Verkada Command is so intuitive. It doesn’t take a lot of digging to get archived videos together, so I save a lot of time.”
Supporting Student Accountability and Fair Discipline
Beyond speed, Verkada helps LESD79 bring more objectivity to student investigations.
When incidents such as fights or altercations occur, school teams still take witness statements. But video provides an additional layer of context that can help administrators understand what happened, who was involved, and whether a student attempted to walk away or de-escalate.
“A big part of it is making sure we don’t discipline a student who did the right thing and tried to mitigate the altercation,” said Foster-De-Oro. “With cameras, we can see that a student tried to walk away, or that other students blocked them off.”
That visibility is also changing student behavior. Foster-De-Oro noted that some middle school campuses had seen frequent minor incidents before the camera rollout. Now that students know staff are actively using video to investigate and respond, the cameras are helping reinforce accountability.
“It’s no longer an idle threat where students see old cameras and assume no one is watching or that they don’t really work,” he said. “Now they know, because we’re calling them out on occurrences and holding them accountable for their actions.”
While the district is still completing its rollout and continuing to evaluate longer-term trends, Foster-De-Oro said the cameras appear to be helping curb some behaviors.
“I haven’t had as many serious reports,” he said. “That could be due to the cameras.”
Building a Future-Proof Safety Platform
LESD79’s investment in Verkada is also designed to support the district’s long-term safety strategy. As the district continues deploying cameras and sensors, Foster-De-Oro is looking ahead to how analytics, alerts, and usage trends can help school teams make more informed decisions across campuses.
One area of focus is arrival and dismissal, when student movement is highest and staffing decisions matter most. Some gates and entry points see more activity than others, and LESD79’s protocol requires open gates to be staffed. With camera-based occupancy trends, the district can better understand how students and visitors move through key areas over time — helping leaders identify high-traffic entry points, adjust coverage, and refine procedures based on actual campus patterns.
“Some gates get more traffic than others,” said Foster-De-Oro. “If we can better understand which areas are being used most during arrival and dismissal, we can make sure we’re placing staff where they’re needed and continue refining our process over time.”
The team is also interested in Verkada’s AI-powered capabilities, including activity detection alerts for behaviors such as fighting, fence climbing, or falls. For Foster-De-Oro, those tools matter because they can help staff respond faster, better understand what happened, and take steps to keep similar incidents from happening again.
“If we can have technology working in the background to notify an administrator when these occurrences happen, that’s tremendous,” he said. “It helps us prevent liability issues from happening.”
That future-focused approach was especially important because the district is investing public funds into safety and security upgrades.
“Anything we do for the district, we want it to support not just the problems we have today, but also the technology of the future,” said Foster-De-Oro. “Since we’re using bond funds and taxpayer dollars to improve the district, we want to make sure the investment will continue to support our needs.”
A Reliable System Schools Can Count On
For both IT and safety, reliability has been one of the most meaningful improvements.
“Anytime I’ve had to access Verkada cameras, even from my cell phone, it has never failed,” he said. “There hasn’t been one time when I was frustrated because I couldn’t access cameras that were already up. That speaks volumes to me.”
For LESD79, that reliability supports a larger mission: helping staff, students, families, and local authorities maintain safe campuses through better visibility, faster response, and more confident decision-making.
“We’re trying to future-proof what we do,” said Montoya. “When we evaluated other vendors, Verkada stood out because it gave us the capabilities we needed today and the flexibility to support where we’re going next.”