How many people are still inside if you have to evacuate

Counting isn’t asked for in words: it is drawn. Asking in plain language is for searching and for describing a situation, but a count needs to know exactly where the line runs and in which direction, and only a stroke drawn on the image settles that. Here there’s one line drawn across the threshold of the classroom door — cross it inward and you’re added, cross it outward and you’re taken off — and one area painted over the whole room. Those two things give the only number that matters: how many people are inside right now. Because the line is drawn once and doesn’t move, Tuesday’s count and Friday’s come from the same place and can be compared: it’s repeatable and it can be audited. And IRIS people counting is approved by the Centro Español de Metrología, Spain’s national metrology institute, so that the figure is the right one is vouched for by an independent third party, not by us. That approval covers people counting; not the whole product. That approval is Spanish and it isn’t equivalent to any U.S. certification: we say so up front and not at the end.

Today, when a building gets emptied, a classroom is called clear because somebody walks in, looks around and walks out. With twelve classrooms, three hallways and a gym, that adds up to minutes; and in a real emergency minutes are all you have. With the line drawn, whoever is coordinating the evacuation sees on a screen whether the room is empty or whether twenty-one people are still in it, space by space, and knows where somebody has to go in and where nobody needs to. That’s all this camera does. It doesn’t take attendance, it doesn’t say who is missing and it doesn’t measure anybody’s work. And it doesn’t show up on its own: the school is the one that puts it there, and the staff and the families are talked to before it goes up, not afterward.