The Beverly Hills Unified School District’s Board of Education unanimously approved an emergency resolution to implement a public paging system for use during emergency situations and for public service announcements.

According to the board agenda for its April 10 meeting, last month, due to recent national events surrounding school campus safety, district staff noticed that the Beverly Hills High School paging system did not work properly throughout several areas of the campus. This posed a major safety and security risk to staff and students unable to properly hear lockdown alerts or other public safety announcements.

The district installed a new IP-based paging system headend in 2015 with new speakers in some parts of the campus through its bond modernization project but was not able to use these funds to replace the bulk of the existing old speaker’s campuswide. The existing analog speakers, cabling and amps are 25 years or older. The urgency of this project is largely attributed to the assessment that determined a large number of these older speakers are not working.

The district has sought installation services from Digital Network Group for complete replacement of existing 25-year-old paging speakers with newer units. Leveraging the newer IP-based system saves the district on the cost of specialized wiring and amp replacement.

Digital Network is one of a few available qualified contractors of this product in greater Los Angeles and has specific experience installing this system for the district in the past including at the high school, and El Rodeo and Horace Mann schools.

The cost of this work is $116,602.23. The scope includes installation of category cabling into existing conduit, installation of new paging speakers, programming and configuration, and final system testing.