Cariboo-Chilcotin School District 27 serves approximately 4,600 students and nearly 1,000 staff across 22 schools and 25 total sites spread over roughly 28,000 square miles of central British Columbia. Milestone XProtect helps the district centrally manage video security across this vast territory while supporting day-to-day operations, incident response and its longer-term move toward a more proactive safety model.
Protecting a school district that spans hundreds of miles, with no staff dedicated to continuously monitoring cameras and schools located far from centralized resources, requires a system that is manageable, scalable, and cost-effective. SD27's previous video management platform, supported by a third-party integrator, came with support costs that made meaningful expansion difficult. Remote facilities, including fuel depots serving schools in the Chilcotin, were vulnerable to theft. In-town schools faced ongoing issues with break-ins and property crime. And with no one available to monitor cameras continuously, the district needed a platform that could support both day-to-day operations and incident response without adding administrative burden.
Following a successful district-wide Bosch intrusion alarm upgrade with local integrator O-Netrix Solutions, SD27 transitioned its video security infrastructure to Milestone XProtect VMS. Each site has its own local storage server, allowing video to be recorded and stored on-site, while the servers connect back to SD27's XProtect data center in Williams Lake for centralized management, event alerts, and role mapping for XProtect Web. Role-based access, managed through Active Directory integration, restricts each principal's view to their own school and updates automatically when staff transfer between sites. The XProtect web client replaced a desktop-only application, making remote access to live and recorded video practical for the first time across a district this size.
The XProtect deployment is already delivering practical operational value across multiple facility types. At the remote Tatla Lake fuel depot, Kyle Riley says the district has experienced no further thefts since cameras were installed. Exterior perimeter coverage at in-town schools now supports the district's locked-door, single-entry access policy, put in place following the Tumbler Ridge shooting. At Lake City Secondary in Williams Lake, HALO vape detection sensors send administrators email alerts when vaping is detected. A pilot camera deployment lets administrators correlate those alerts with video from the same time period, helping identify who entered the area around the time of the event. Across the district, the system has become a reliable resource for investigating and documenting incidents after the fact.
Following the Tumbler Ridge shooting, SD27 locked exterior doors district-wide and designated front entrances as the single point of entry and exit. Some elementary schools previously had no cameras, so the district began expanding coverage to those entry points using its existing XProtect platform.
SD27 operates 25 sites, 100 buses and employs nearly 1,000 staff across an enormous territory. Because funding is driven largely by student enrollment rather than geographic size, the district needed a video platform it could expand incrementally as funding allowed.
Today, SD27 sees XProtect primarily as a forensic tool, allowing administrators to return to recorded video and understand what happened. At the remote Tatla Lake facility, for example, ongoing fuel theft stopped after cameras were installed.
SD27's longer-term goal is to move from reactive security toward prevention. At 108 Mile House Elementary, the district piloted Bosch camera analytics to detect loitering and trigger email notifications and automated announcements through the school's Bogen PA system. False detections, particularly during winter conditions, prevented broader deployment, and O-Netrix has been working with Bosch to troubleshoot the analytics.