NIC Partners (with AtlasIED) has won the 2025 Commercial Integration Award for Best K-12 Project for the Torrance Unified School District Security Upgrade Case Study! Be sure to visit our official announcement page to see the full gallery of award-winning projects as they are revealed.)
The Torrance Unified School District is a cornerstone of the Torrance community, dedicated to providing a high-quality education that prepares students for success in college, career, and life. Serving a diverse student population, Torrance USD delivers a comprehensive and enriching educational experience from kindergarten through high school. The school district comprises 17 elementary, eight middle and five high schools, one continuation high school, and one alternative high school.
Like many school districts, Torrance USD had a mashup of different technologies and vendor solutions across its schools regarding the ability to broadcast announcements and alerts. Each school had separate systems for bells, clocks and loudspeakers. There was no central management of these systems, and the school district couldn’t create pre-recorded messages for emergencies. Many system components were also end-of-life and maintaining everything was cumbersome at best.
Why Torrance USD Focused on Consolidation For Reliability and Consistency
Torrance USD began planning district-wide communication improvements in 2020, with the overarching goal of deploying one uniform system through all 32 campuses, with one dashboard to manage communications. The school district achieved its goal by deploying Cisco Call Manager coupled with Singlewire’s InformaCast communications software and hundreds of IPX endpoints from AtlasIED. Vetted integration technology partners like Cisco, Singlewire and AtlasIED ensure that interoperability, reliability and usability have all been verified and validated through extensive testing.
“This project was part of a larger strategic plan to secure each campus — improve perimeter security, add surveillance cameras, allow for emergency alerting, consolidate the speaker systems, and standardize the bells,” says Gil Mara, chief EdTech and information services officer at Torrance USD. “For example, when you went from one campus to another, campuses had different bell sequences for scenarios like lockdowns. So, there was no consistency of the alerting mechanisms, and we wanted to ensure it was consistent across all the schools.”
District staff says it contacted Nilkanth Radadia, senior account manager at NIC Partners, to design the desired district-wide communications solution. NIC Partners states that it has over two decades of experience enhancing the digital and physical security of K-12 schools, which made the company an ideal choice to take on a project of Torrance USD’s scale.
Bringing in AtlasIED
“Many stakeholders were involved in this project,” says Radadia. ”Given the project’s scope and requirements, there were a lot of conversations beforehand to get the district comfortable with understanding how the system would work. Some key elements were customizability, two-way talk, multicolor visual message capabilities and ADA compliance for the visual and hearing impaired. When AtlasIED came out with their full LCD screen speaker, that was a game changer.”
According to the team, AtlasIED was chosen as the vendor for the system upgrades after a thorough evaluation of various vendors. Their feature set and industrial design, particularly the full LCD screen speaker, stood out. NIC Partners installed nearly 1,700 IPSDMF speakers throughout the schools to ensure messages were audible, visible and intelligible.
Ensuring Accessibility and Security
Torrance USD installed nearly 1,700 AtlasIED IP-SDMF Speakers throughout the schools.
Courtesy / NIC Partners Inc.
Leveraging standard WAN or LAN network architecture, each speaker comes equipped with an integrated talkback microphone, LCD and LED flasher, supporting both visual text and audio broadcast to enhance physical security while improving day-to-day communications through advanced alerting, bell schedules and pre-recorded and scheduled announcements. For example, at 8:30 am each morning, the Pledge of Allegiance is broadcast to all schools with a patriotic color palette appearing on the IPX endpoints.
“We needed to implement a solution that would serve the needs of all the students, including those with visual or audio impairments,” says Mara. “That’s why having the LED blinker and the message crawler was essential. That solved the issues regarding accessibility for our students and staff to ensure they got the message(s) every time.”
Designing the Campus Exteriors for Torrance USD
For campus exteriors, NIC Partners says it chose the IP-HVP speaker from AtlasIED. The IP-HVP is a vandal-proof, IP45 weather-resistant, wall-mount IP speaker well-suited for environments where network-wide communication is desired, and high output is required to overcome excessive ambient noise or large spaces. Almost 600 IPHVP speakers were installed district-wide.
Additionally, the Power over Ethernet (PoE+)-enabled IPX endpoints connect through the same IT network the school uses to deliver Internet access. The platform simplifies the installation process for integrators and reduces the need to introduce multiple cable types to a project. The IPX platform also offers scalability benefits, allowing schools the flexibility to expand their systems as the district’s communications evolve.
Benefits of the IPX Series
The IPX Series also helped Torrance USD incorporate new and expanded campus safety capabilities with the help of InformaCast mass communications software. Using InformaCast, designated school personnel can initiate an alert from a mobile device wherever they are. The software then sends text messages to faculty, students and parents’ mobile devices, alerts law enforcement and activates attention-grabbing audio alarms and LCD text messages on the installed IPX devices throughout the school or district.
Currently, Torrance USD says it is trying out various color combinations on the IPX LCD screens to indicate different kinds of alerts, including earthquakes, shelter-in-place and all-clear messages.
Adopting Best Practices
NIC Partners says it started with the smallest school to establish best practices for implementation. Once the team completed the first school with future implementation methods documented, NIC Partners went full-on with the remaining schools, working second shift during the school year and completing all the upgrades district-wide in less than five months.
The communication system is in the final phase of upgrading all the schools to InformaCast Fusion servers and upgrading Cisco Call Manager to Webex calling. These updates will allow select school and district staff members to make emergency announcements or push out notifications directly from their cell phones.
Positive Feedback Echoes Around Torrance USD Campus
Courtesy / NIC Partners Inc
According to the teams, the staff and students appreciate the audio upgrades, albeit for different reasons. Teachers also enjoy the improved audio clarity, as they can finally hear things “loud and clear,” and emergency alerts include visual messaging. Meanwhile, students love the music played at the end of each period to indicate a class transition.
“Before the upgrades, you couldn’t make a good page,” says Mara. “Now, the audio clarity is way better. We’re delighted with the IPX products and even happier to have NIC Partners and AtlasIED as our partners for such a huge undertaking. We wouldn’t have been successful without their help.”
