For schools, campuses & facilities
Keep your cameras. Keep your doors. Add the Care OS brain.
Most campuses already have cameras and doors. Pioneer Overlay adds a local Care OS brain — keep the gear, add the brain. Student Wi‑Fi stays off staff/security. Video and badge stay local. Private live view + phone/email alerts. Most schools are under ~$3,000/year for Pioneer Care versus roughly $8–15K+/year for a typical cloud stack; larger campuses are sized up and cost more.
The problem: forever rent
Category examples schools already pay for — Meraki, Umbrella, Verkada, Lenel, AnyConnect — lock you into annual cloud subscriptions. Cameras, filtering, VPN, and access become recurring line items that never stop.
Rent forever
Cloud license stack
Separate vendors for NVR, DNS filtering, VPN, and access — each with its own contract and annual renewal.
$8–15K+/yr in licenses
Data and features live off-site — where vendors get breached. Costs climb as you add doors and cameras.
Overlay first
Care OS on what you own
Keep the cameras and doors you already paid for. Add a local Care OS brain — ops, alerts, and monitoring in your building.
Significant yearly savings vs cloud rent
Safer local ownership. Care sized to campus. Greenfield rebuild only if gear is thin — optional later path, not the default.
Cloud school platforms get breached constantly
Student and staff data is among the most sensitive anything a district holds — SSNs, health records, IEPs, home addresses. Attackers (and AI-assisted phishing) make this worse, not better. When a cloud vendor is the weak link, districts get sued — and when cloud cameras are reachable from outside, a breach can turn your own surveillance into a live map of the building.
Education is heavily attacked
In 2025 education ranked among the most-attacked sectors globally. Ransomware recovery for K–12 averages about $2.28 million per incident — before downtime and litigation. Student records in cloud SIS are one blast radius.
Cloud cameras can become a live map
When camera systems live in a vendor cloud, a stolen login or breach doesn’t just leak files — it can expose live video of your building. Anyone who reaches that feed can see hallways, entries, and where people are in real time. That is reconnaissance on your campus.
Local-first cuts remote recon
Pioneer keeps video, access events, and DNS filtering on-prem, on a camera VLAN inside your firewall — not a forever-rented cloud dashboard. Remote Care uses keys on approved devices, not a password on the public internet. Building staff get an on-site view. Outsiders don’t get a website to phish.
Figures drawn from industry reporting summarized in Pioneer’s school security technical materials. Not legal advice.
Day-one Overlay value
Plain English — what you get when Care OS plugs into gear you already own. Deeper stack details: The System.
Keep cams & doors
Add the Care OS brain on a Mac Mini. No rip-and-replace.
Student ≠ staff Wi‑Fi
VLAN split so student traffic stays off staff and security networks.
Sensitive data stays local
Video and badge logs on-prem — no public hallway browsing, no random internet to cams.
Badge / door events
See when staff enter (and more) when electronic access exists.
Private live view + alerts
Keyed live view for approved staff. Phone and email alerts when it matters.
Cyber harden basics
No port-forwards. Care tunnel instead of a public camera dashboard.
Gap-map intake
Have / Need / Path to live from what you already run — start on Overlay.
Care sized to campus
Monitoring, updates, escalation — sized to your site, not a one-price-fits-all.
Two kinds of campuses
Overlay helps both — same Care OS brain, different starting pain.
1
Paying cloud rent
Verkada-class dashboards, annual cam/access licenses. Keep usable gear where you can; cut the forever rent; put the brain local.
2
Already local — but messy
Cams and doors on-prem, but flat networks, shared student Wi‑Fi, port-forwards, or no alerts. Overlay hardens and unifies without a rebuild.
Coming with your doors / policy (next phase): panic/button lockdown sequences · soft lockdown vs drill (labeled) · fire = egress OUT only, never unlock ingress. Not required on day one.
Overlay economics
Keep the gear. Cut the cloud rent.
Lead with Overlay
Care OS on cams & doors you already own
Stop paying forever for cloud camera and access dashboards. Overlay adds a local Care OS brain plus Pioneer Care. Most schools are under ~$3,000/year for Care versus roughly $8–15K+/year for a typical cloud stack; larger campuses are sized up and cost more. Full greenfield rebuild is only when gear is thin — an optional later path.
- Keep existing cameras and doors
- Add Care OS (Mac Mini) + required Care
- Significant yearly savings vs cloud rent
- Grants can help — optional, not required
Pioneer Care
Required with Overlay: remote monitoring, updates, and backup checks. Most schools are under ~$3,000/year for Pioneer Care versus roughly $8–15K+/year for a typical cloud stack; larger campuses are sized up and cost more. The brain stays local.
Ready to talk Overlay
Tell us what cameras and doors you already run. We’ll map an Overlay path (and a greenfield option only if gear is thin) — grants only if you want that accelerator.