Case Study: Yuma Union High School District achieves reliable, scalable 900-camera campus surveillance with Verkada

Yuma Union High School District - Customer Case Study

Yuma Union High School District, which serves five high schools, one alternative site and over 11,000 students across six district sites, faced an aging NVR/DVR video system that frequently overheated in Arizona’s extreme heat, required costly replacements, and made deployment and routine maintenance tedious and unreliable. CIO Dean Farrar selected Verkada’s hybrid‑cloud, all‑in‑one camera solution (with Command software) to address reliability, high maintenance costs, and the slow, unsustainable deployment process.

Verkada replaced the legacy architecture with plug‑and‑play PoE cameras and cloud management, enabling each camera to function independently (avoiding single‑point failures), simplifying installs, and centralizing footage search and sharing. In about five months the district rolled out roughly 900 cameras across six campuses, reduced hardware failures and maintenance overhead, sped investigations with time‑lapse and fast clip sharing (helping police get footage that led to a taxi ban on campus), and gave principals more autonomy — all achieved using Verkada’s solution.

Yuma Union High School District

Dean Farar

Chief Information Officer