How schools are turning death traps for toddlers

Most answers to this question will revolve around educating them, grooming them into better and more aware citizens of the society, exposing and equipping them to face the reality of life and making them adept at various skills, which can help them shape their future. When parents kiss their kids goodbye, they expect them to come back jovial, with stories to tell about how their day was. Each parent sends their children to school, with the hope that schools are a safe abode, where children will be loved and nurtured. Not killed or assaulted.

In the wake of rampant mass shootings in schools to kids being sexually abused by school employees, the safety mechanisms that schools have been equipped with have started being eyed with scepticism.” A 7-year young boy was found murdered, in Gurugram, with his throat slit, in school the washroom, with no mechanism in place to raise as much as an alarm when the camera spotted a teenager entering the school premises with a knife, or even exiting the school with blood stained clothes. According to CNN, “There has been, on average, 1 school shooting every week, in 2018, in the States.” Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old mentally ill man who reportedly had a preoccupation with mass shootings, in particular the 1999 Columbine massacre, killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, and then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary school, Connecticut, USA, where he shot and killed 26 people, including 20 first-graders, in less than 11 minutes, before taking his own life[1]. The saddest part is, nothing could be done to prevent it. In another horrific incident which took place on December 16, 2014, in Peshawar, Pakistan, about seven armed fighters from the Pakistan Taliban (TTP) entered the Army Public school and slaughtered 144 people, mostly children between the ages of 12 and 16. Many of the pupils were shot as they hid under desks in their classrooms or crouched behind chairs in the school's auditorium. Some were told to pray before they were shot. One of the members of staff was reportedly burned alive in front of the children [3]. And again, there was no mechanism to alert the school authorities of the entry of 7 gunmen into the school premises [3].

Thus, as has been made obvious by the above instances, the time has come to revamp our existing surveillance systems and make them more efficient at dealing with crimes by preventing them, rather than merely acting as passive viewers. We need cameras that work as per our command, send us alerts as and when we want them, at whatever and how many ever IDs we want them on. The time has come to rely on systems which maintain a database about each person stepping on the school grounds, and raises an alarm as soon as it spots any weapon or unauthorized intrusions. Now is the time to start relying on automated attendance systems, which inform the parent in case a child is absent/missing from class, immediately.

How would you feel if you were told that all these objectives can be achieved by installing a single algorithm? Well, it’s true! Having realised that the safety of your children if of paramount importance, we, at FaceOrbitTM, have revolutionised the existing surveillance systems by closely walking along the steps of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Video analytics and function-specific algorithms are used by FaceOrbitTM to track the movements of children, and store it in a database for any future reference. Such logs are accessible at all times, from anywhere around the globe, so that all parents can keep a constant eye on their children’s whereabouts. Whether it comes to warning the authorities about the presence of weapons within school premise, or any unauthorized intrusion, in the form of time bound emails, FaceOrbitTM is adept at that too.

There is nothing more precious to a parent than a child, and nothing more important to our future than the safety of all our children