TORRANCE USD Case Study

Torrance Unified School District Standardizes Its Mass Communications on AtlasIED’s IPX Family

Torrance USD Standardizes Its Mass Communications on AtlasIED’s IPX Family
The Torrance Unified School District is a cornerstone of the Torrance community, dedicated to providing a high-quality education that prepares students for success in college, career, and life. Serving a diverse student population, Torrance USD delivers a comprehensive and enriching educational experience from kindergarten through high school. The school district comprises 17 elementary, eight middle, and five high schools, one continuation high school, and one alternative high school.

Like many school districts, Torrance USD had a mashup of different technologies and vendor solutions across its schools regarding the ability to broadcast announcements and alerts. Each school had separate systems for bells, clocks, and loudspeakers. There was no central management of these systems, and the school district couldn’t create pre-recorded messages for emergencies. Many system components were also end-of-life, and maintaining everything was cumbersome at best.

Focusing on Consolidation For Reliability and Consistency
Torrance USD began planning district-wide communication improvements in 2020, with the overarching goal of deploying one uniform system through all 32 campuses, with one dashboard to manage communications. The school district achieved its goal by deploying Cisco Call Manager coupled with Singlewire’s InformaCast communications software and hundreds of IPX endpoints from AtlasIED. Vetted integration technology partners like Cisco, Singlewire, and AtlasIED ensure that interoperability, reliability, and usability have all been verified and validated through extensive testing.

“This project was part of a larger strategic plan to secure each campus — improve perimeter security, add surveillance cameras, allow for emergency alerting, consolidate the speaker systems, and standardize the bells,” said Gil Mara, Chief EdTech and Information Services Officer at Torrance USD. “For example, when you went from one campus to another, campuses had different bell sequences for scenarios like lockdowns. So, there was no consistency of the alerting mechanisms, and we wanted to ensure it was consistent across all the schools.”

District staff contacted Nilkanth Radadia, Senior Account Manager at NIC Partners, to design the desired district-wide communications solution. NIC Partners has over two decades of experience enhancing the digital and physical security of K-12 schools and was well-suited to take on a project of Torrance USD’s scale.

Focusing on What’s Most Important
“Many stakeholders were involved in this project,” said Radadia. ”Given the project’s scope and requirements, there were a lot of conversations beforehand to get the district comfortable with understanding how the system would work. Some key elements were customizability, two-way talk, multicolor visual message capabilities, and ADA compliance for the visual and hearing impaired. When AtlasIED came out with their full LCD screen speaker, that was a game changer.”

AtlasIED was chosen as the vendor for the system upgrades after a thorough evaluation of various vendors. Their feature set and industrial design, particularly the full LCD screen speaker, stood out. NIC Partners installed nearly 1700 IPSDMF speakers throughout the schools to ensure messages were audible, visible, and intelligible. Leveraging standard WAN or LAN network architecture, each speaker is equipped with an integrated talkback microphone, LCD, and LED flasher, supporting both visual text and audio broadcast to enhance physical security while improving day-to-day communications through advanced alerting, bell schedules, and pre-recorded and scheduled announcements. For example, at 8:30 each morning, the Pledge of Allegiance is broadcast to all schools with a patriotic color palette appearing on the IPX endpoints.

“We needed to implement a solution that would serve the needs of all the students, including those with visual or audio impairments,” said Mara. “That’s why having the LED blinker and the message crawler was essential. That solved the issues regarding accessibility for our students and staff to ensure they got the message(s) every time.”

For campus exteriors, NIC Partners chose the IP-HVP speaker from AtlasIED. The IP-HVP is a vandal-proof, IP45 weather-resistant, wall-mount IP speaker well-suited for environments where network-wide communication is desired, and high output is required to overcome excessive ambient noise or large spaces. Almost 600 IPHVP speakers were installed district-wide.

Additionally, the Power over Ethernet (PoE+)-enabled IPX endpoints connect through the same IT network the school uses to deliver Internet access. The platform simplifies the installation process for integrators and reduces the need to introduce multiple cable types to a project. The IPX platform also offers scalability benefits, allowing schools the flexibility to expand their systems as the district’s communications evolve.

The IPX Series also helped Torrance USD incorporate new and expanded campus safety capabilities with the help of InformaCast mass communications software. Using InformaCast, designated school personnel can initiate an alert from a mobile device wherever they are. The software then sends text messages to faculty, students, and parents’ mobile devices, alerts law enforcement, and activates attention-grabbing audio alarms and LCD text messages on the installed IPX devices throughout the school or district. Currently, Torrance USD is trying out various color combinations on the IPX LCD screens to indicate different kinds of alerts, including earthquakes, shelter-in-place, and all-clear messages.

Intentional and Phased Deployment Leads To Consistent Use and Increased Adoption
NIC Partners started with the smallest school to establish best practices for implementation. Once the first school was completed and future implementation methods documented, NIC Partners went full-on with the remaining schools, working second shift during the school year and completing all the upgrades district-wide in less than five months

The communication system is in the final phase of upgrading all the schools to InformaCast Fusion servers and upgrading Cisco Call Manager to Webex calling. These updates will allow select school and district staff members to make emergency announcements or push out notifications directly from their cell phones.

Staff and students appreciate the audio upgrades, albeit for different reasons Teachers are relieved by the improved audio clarity, as they can finally hear things “loud and clear,” and emergency alerts include visual messaging. Students love the music played at the end of each period to indicate a class transition.

“Before the upgrades, you couldn’t make a good page,” said Mara. “Now, the audio clarity is way better. We’re delighted with the IPX products and even happier to have NIC Partners and AtlasIED as our partners for such a huge undertaking. We wouldn’t have been successful without their help.”