Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish in Grove City, Ohio is comprised of seven buildings, which includes the church, preschool, elementary school, rectory, storage garage, athletic building and modular classrooms. The parish grew from around a dozen visitors daily to now more than 80 people visiting the church every weekday morning and more than 500 people visiting over three separate services each weekend. The elementary school has grown to host more than 300 students and 50 staff members and volunteers, with the preschool adding another 40 students and staff members to the campus tally. With 28 exterior doors now encompassing the fully renovated church, school and preschool, the parish knew it was time for a substantial security upgrade.
A main challenge at the parish was being able to control access at all seven buildings and provide an environment with improved personal security for their staff, students and patrons. The security system the parish had in place consisted of a few standalone keypads and electric locks on a couple of doors with no centralized management or communication. With an influx of people accessing the parish and its facilities, both the facilities director and the maintenance/technology specialist at the parish were ready to find the right access control solution. The new system needed to not just limit access, but also control it.
After careful consideration and research, the parish selected the ISONAS Pure IP access control solution from a local certified independent security integrator Systems 28.
The project consisted of installing 24 ISONAS RC-04 reader controllers, with 21 deployed on exterior doors and three on interior doors in a month’s timeframe. The parish chose the ISONAS solution for a myriad of reasons, with one main factor being the ability to use power over the ethernet for the card readers and electric locks. The parish also liked the fact that an on-site server was not required with the ISONAS solution, as having a cloud-based server was critical to manage access remotely for multiple buildings.
Along with the ISONAS hardware, the ISONAS Pure Access software was deployed for its remote access capabilities. Pure Access software is a cloud-based access control application that provides users the ability to manage their access control from anywhere at any time, on any device.
“The ISONAS system is extremely user friendly and much more convenient than the previous ‘stand-alone’ system we had in place prior to this upgrade,” said Kevin Radwanski, facilities director at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish. “We especially like the remote access functionality, as it has been great for us to be able to lock and unlock doors remotely during regular times and emergency situations like the global pandemic.”
