Key Results
7 schools and 9 total locations supported across Yuma Union High School District
Just under 11,000 students served
Hundreds of thousands of dollars in estimated NVR hardware costs avoided at one large high school alone
~1 hour saved per user by automating video security and access control provisioning
One unified platform connecting IT, facilities, school leadership, campus security teams, and safety leadership
“The biggest value has been scalability. Verkada lets us grow based on campus needs, not recorder capacity. We can refresh cameras, add coverage, and respond to requests from principals without worrying about whether an NVR is full or whether we need to buy more infrastructure first.”
— Brandan Krizay, Director of Technology, Yuma Union High School District
Background
Yuma Union High School District serves just under 11,000 students across seven schools and nine total locations in Yuma, Arizona. As Director of Technology, Brandan Krizay and his team support the district’s technology infrastructure, including the systems that help school leaders, facilities teams, and safety personnel maintain visibility across campuses.
Yuma was one of Verkada’s earliest K–12 customers. Nearly a decade later, the district is refreshing its camera fleet and expanding its use of Verkada across access control, intercoms, and additional security workflows.
For Brandan, that decision reflects how much both the district’s needs and Verkada’s platform have evolved.
“Campus safety has evolved significantly over the past decade,” Brandan said. “As the needs of our students, staff, and community have changed, the district has adapted as well. We now have a dedicated Director of Health and Safety, and IT’s role is to support that work with the right technology, visibility, and infrastructure.”
Today, IT is no longer the sole owner of physical security. Instead, the technology team helps enable the systems, while facilities, administrators, campus security teams, and safety leadership use Verkada day to day.
Moving Beyond DVRs and NVRs
Before Verkada, Yuma’s video security environment relied on multiple DVRs across campuses. Each DVR was capped at 16 coax cameras, creating a fragmented system that was difficult to maintain, scale, and trust.
“At the time, almost every solution was still NVR-driven,” Brandan said. “We were managing multiple DVRs across each campus, many of them already maxed out, and they were starting to fail. For a district our size, that model just wasn’t sustainable anymore.”
As the district evaluated replacement options, Brandan found that most vendors still depended on centralized NVR infrastructure. For a large, distributed school district with campuses spread across multiple buildings, that model introduced a costly bottleneck.
“At our scale, NVRs became the expensive part of the equation,” he said. “We have campuses that look more like small colleges, so adding coverage couldn’t mean adding more recorders every time.”
The district needed a system that could scale without requiring new recorder infrastructure every time camera coverage expanded. Verkada’s hybrid cloud architecture, with onboard storage on each camera, offered a different path.
“We kept thinking, ‘When is somebody going to come up with onboard storage on a camera?’” Brandan said. “Then we stumbled right into Verkada.”
A Long-Term Partnership That Has Grown With the District
As one of Verkada’s earliest K–12 customers, Yuma had a front-row seat to the evolution of the platform. What began as a new approach to video security has grown into a broader platform supporting more of the district’s physical security and building operations workflows.
“Verkada’s platform has matured a lot since we first deployed it,” Brandan said. “What stood out to us early on was that the team listened to customer feedback and continued building around real needs. Features like Active Directory integration were important to us, and seeing that kind of feedback make its way into the platform gave us confidence in the partnership.”
That early collaboration has turned into a long-term relationship. As Verkada expanded beyond cameras into access control, intercoms, and a more unified building security platform, Yuma saw an opportunity to simplify more of its physical security operations.
“Over time, Verkada has become more than a camera system for us,” Brandan said. “As the platform has expanded into access control and other areas, it has given our facilities team tools that are much easier to use, manage, and scale.”
That usability became a major reason the district chose to continue partnering with Verkada. Instead of managing security through disconnected tools, Yuma could bring more workflows into a single platform used by IT, facilities, school leadership, and safety teams.
Simplifying Work Between IT and Facilities
The impact of that unified platform is especially clear in access control. Before Verkada Access Control, the district managed multiple disparate access control systems. At one point, Brandan said, three different systems were in use across three schools — with two systems at one school alone. For facilities, those systems were difficult to maintain. For IT, they created extra manual work because access could not be automatically assigned based on a person’s role or location.
“The old systems were hard for facilities to manage, and they didn’t let us automate access based on someone’s job or location,” Brandan said. “That created a lot of manual work for both facilities and IT.”
With Verkada, Yuma can automate access based on data from its HR and identity systems. When a new principal is assigned to a school, for example, they can automatically receive the appropriate video permissions for that campus. The district has applied the same approach to access control, reducing manual handoffs between IT and facilities.
“Putting access control on one platform changed the workflow,” Brandan said. “Facilities can handle the day-to-day, access can be provisioned automatically, and IT doesn’t have to step in for every change.”
Brandan estimates that manually onboarding a user into both video security and access control previously took about an hour of work between IT and facilities. Automation has reduced that burden while also minimizing errors.
“Automation has helped us reduce both manual work and the errors that come with it,” he said. “We’re not just saving the time it takes to create an account; we’re also avoiding the follow-up work that happens when information is entered incorrectly.”
For Yuma, the bigger impact is the way Verkada has helped both IT and facilities focus on higher-value work.
“We thought we were going to need people sitting between IT and facilities just to manage these workflows,” Brandan said. “Verkada helped simplify the process enough that we don’t need that extra layer anymore.”
Extending the Platform Across Campus Workflows
Beyond cameras and access control, Yuma has extended Verkada into additional workflows that support day-to-day campus operations.
At the district office, Verkada Intercom helps staff manage a locked delivery entrance. All deliveries come through one secured door, and staff can monitor and respond from an iPad. If the person managing the door steps away or goes to lunch, another staff member can take over without leaving the entrance unsecured.
“All district deliveries come through one secured door, and Verkada makes it easy to manage that entrance from an iPad,” Brandan said. “If someone steps away, another staff member can take over and keep an eye on the door without disrupting the workflow.”
Across the district, Verkada is used by a wide range of teams. Facilities maintains cameras and handles access control workflows. Campus security teams use iPads with the Command app to quickly see what is happening and dispatch teams across campus. Principals, school resource officers, and safety leadership use video to understand incidents, make informed decisions, and share context when needed.
“Verkada gives our teams objective context when incidents happen,” Brandan said. “Whether it’s a principal, facilities team member, or school resource officer reviewing the footage, they can better understand what happened and decide what to do next.”
Lowering Total Cost of Ownership Over Time
One of the clearest long-term benefits for Yuma has been the ability to avoid the cost and complexity of NVR-based infrastructure.
When the district evaluated NVR-based options years ago, Brandan recalls seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars in NVR hardware costs for one large high school alone — not including cameras, mounts, cabling, or other deployment costs.
“The NVRs alone were going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars at one high school — before cameras, cabling, mounts, or installation,” Brandan said. “Verkada helped us avoid that infrastructure cost and scale without adding more recorders.”
With Verkada, Yuma avoided that NVR hardware line item at one large high school alone. Across a multi-campus environment, the value grows further by reducing the need to purchase, maintain, replace, and scale centralized recording infrastructure.
For Brandan, the economics are tied directly to scalability.
“With Verkada, scaling is straightforward,” he said. “If we need one more camera or 10 more cameras, we’re not redesigning the system or buying another NVR because we hit a capacity limit. We can add coverage where it’s needed without adding a new layer of infrastructure.”
That flexibility makes it easier for Yuma to respond to campus needs as they arise. If a principal has budget for one more camera, Brandan’s team can add it without redesigning the rest of the system.
“We’ve had other vendors tell us an NVR-based system could save money, but the math changes as soon as you need to scale,” Brandan said. “If an NVR supports 50 cameras, what happens when we need the 51st? With Verkada, we don’t have to buy another recorder just to add coverage. We can put cameras where we need them.”
Looking Ahead: Expanding Access Control
As Yuma refreshes its cameras, the district is also continuing to expand its use of Verkada Access Control across additional building workflows.
“Access control is an area where we see a lot of opportunity to keep expanding with Verkada,” Brandan said. “As we bring more doors, elevators, and building workflows onto the platform, we can manage access in a more consistent way across the district.”
For other school districts evaluating Verkada, Brandan points to the maturity of the platform and the way it helps IT and facilities work from the same foundation.
“What stands out about Verkada is how mature the platform has become,” he said. “It’s not just a security tool for IT or a facilities tool — it helps both teams work together from one shared system.”
For districts already using Verkada and considering whether to continue partnering with Verkada, his answer is simple.
“For us, continuing with Verkada was an easy decision,” Brandan said. “The platform is mature, it keeps improving, and we’re constantly seeing new capabilities that add value for the district.”