Salem City Schools plans districtwide security camera rollout after speeding up investigations

Salem High School says its new AI-powered camera system cut footage review from hours to minutes, and Salem City Schools now plans to expand the platform across the district. The upgrade has also drawn visitors from nearby divisions and a presentation to the school board after a full year in use.

Why it matters: - Salem City Schools is moving toward a districtwide security upgrade after Salem High School said its new camera system dramatically reduced the time needed to investigate incidents. - The change affects both campus safety and staff workload, since administrators no longer have to manually scrub through hours of video to find a single event. - Nearby school divisions are already visiting to see the system in action, which suggests broader interest beyond Salem.

What happened: - Salem High School replaced aging cameras with technology from Coram AI, a Sunnyvale-based AI physical security company. - The school completed its first full year on the new platform. - Salem City Schools plans to roll the same system out across the rest of the division. - The high school presented its first-year results to the district board. - Administrators from neighboring school divisions have visited the campus to observe the system running.

The details: - Before the upgrade, Salem High School cameras had no search capability. - Finding an incident required an administrator to review hours of recording manually, often without a precise time to start. - Staff now search recorded footage by typing a plain-language description of what they are looking for. - The system also runs alerts on the same camera feeds. - Those alerts include detection of visible weapons. - When an alert triggers, designated staff members are notified. - Bonnie Reedy, assistant principal at Salem High School, said the new workflow lets her find footage with “a few words” instead of “a couple hours” of searching. - Reedy said the upgrade has “revolutionized” the way the school keeps the campus safe.

Between the lines: - The rollout points to a shift from passive video storage to active security operations, with search and alert tools doing work that once depended on manual review. - Coram AI is positioning the platform as a way for schools to modernize without replacing all existing infrastructure. - Ashesh Jain, CEO and co-founder of Coram AI, said school administrators should not have to act like video analysts. - Jain also said Salem’s team wanted to ask a question and get an answer, and that other divisions are now coming to watch the system.

What’s next: - Salem City Schools is expected to expand the platform beyond Salem High School to the rest of the district. - More school divisions may evaluate similar AI-assisted security tools after seeing Salem’s results. - Coram AI is likely to continue marketing the system to schools and other institutions as a faster incident-investigation tool.

The bottom line: - Salem High School’s first year with Coram AI turned video review from a time-consuming manual task into a faster search process, and the district now wants that model everywhere.