For an international school like Avenues São Paulo, security is not limited to protecting buildings and assets — it is inseparable from safeguarding students, maintaining trust with families, and supporting a dynamic, non-traditional educational environment.
Serving more than 1,200 full-time students and hundreds of staff within a 42,000 square-meter campus, Avenues São Paulo operates one of the most complex private education institutes in Brazil. To support this responsibility, the school relies on Milestone open platform video management software (VMS) as the backbone of a robust and scalable, future-ready security system.
340 AXIS® network video cameras, mix of models
Unlike traditional schools, Avenues São Paulo operates on a project-based learning model where students move continuously across classrooms, shared spaces, and unconventional learning environments throughout the day. This high level of mobility — combined with the school’s full-day schedule — creates unique security and safety challenges. All students arrive and depart during the same time windows, producing intense peaks in pedestrian and vehicle traffic. During these critical periods, the school must closely manage both who enters and who leaves the campus, a requirement that significantly increases operational complexity and risk.
In addition to daily activity, the campus serves a high-profile, international community. Families are deeply invested in the school’s values and expect the highest standards of safety, discretion, and professionalism. Despite having excellent security hardware already installed, Avenues struggled to fully leverage its technology due to limitations with a previous systems integrator. The result was a sophisticated security infrastructure that failed to deliver the reliability, visibility, and operational confidence the school required.
Consequently, Avenues São Paulo retained Engenharia de Sistemas de Segurança (ESS Brasil) to bring together video analytics, audio perimeter protection, access control, and facial recognition with an efficient open platform VMS. Milestone System’s XProtect Expert was deployed and optimized across the entire campus.
Milestone’s VMS manages more than 340 cameras from Axis Communications, integrating fixed dome and bullet cameras for indoor and outdoor coverage, thermal cameras for perimeter monitoring, and PTZ cameras combined with radar for automated detection and tracking in open areas. Axis camera analytics, like AXIS Perimeter Defender, are used to create virtual perimeters and generate real-time alerts, while IP speakers provide audio deterrence when intrusion is detected.
The system also integrates the school’s access control solution, including facial recognition readers from the HID® Amico™ line, enabling secure, touchless identity verification at key access points. This allows operators to correlate video, access, and identity events from a single pane-of-glass, strengthening both security and safeguarding across the campus. All video data is processed and stored on local servers in line with institutional IT and data governance policies.
The system provides real-time visibility across the campus while enabling fast, precise forensic investigation when incidents require review. Operators can monitor high-risk entry and exit periods closely, while the security teams benefit from increased situational awareness across shared spaces—helping identify and address issues such as student conflicts, unauthorized movement, or misplaced students before they escalate.
Perimeter security has been significantly strengthened. Since the system became operational, the school reports no intrusion attempts on campus, while previously vulnerable adjacent areas—where unauthorized access was common—are now fully monitored, with all activity detected in real time through integrated analytics, radar, and audio alerts. At the same time, ongoing system optimization has significantly reduced false alarms, allowing operators to focus on meaningful events and improving overall efficiency.
By investing early in an open platform video architecture, Avenues has built a flexible foundation that supports not only campus growth, but also continuous innovation. This approach ensures the school can adapt to evolving needs— without being constrained by end-to-end, proprietary technology. Video has become a proactive tool for behavioral insight and operational awareness. It is so deeply embedded that the school now relies on it as a core part of daily decision-making, reinforcing its commitment to student care.
See more about Milestone VMS helping schools be safe:
Video security software for schools | Milestone Systems