Will McFarland spent seven years as an EMT before becoming a campus safety officer at Front Range Community College. Before that, he worked hospital security.
“I saw a need for more safety in our public spaces,” he says. “Education being the primary aspect, I find a very big pull for my job coming here and protecting the educational piece, so that people don't end up as a statistic.”
Dr. Ethan Johnson, Front Range's Vice President of Operations, describes the same instinct from a different perspective.
“We have to have safety before we can have the education,” he says.
Across three campuses and nearly 30,000 students and staff, that idea shapes how Front Range approaches campus safety.
The problem was that making it work required five to eight different systems. .
Building it together
Like many colleges, Front Range had accumulated safety technology one budget cycle at a time.
Oculus ran the cameras. DNA Fusion ran access control. Other systems covered alarms, student records, mass notifications, and more.
“The biggest mistake most colleges make is they piecemeal it,” McFarland says. “We bought separate programs at different rates to justify budget. Now you have multiple systems to manage separately: separate IT, separate support, separate issues.”
Verifying one visitor's identity could mean jumping between three or four systems. A medical incident could take an hour to document. Monthly checks on fire extinguishers, AEDs, and first aid kits were done by hand, with one campus consuming an entire ten-hour shift.
“A lot of our systems were disparate,” Johnson says. “They were not communicating with each other. We had a lot of lost lag time between investigations, between responses.”
He estimates the college could lose 10 to 15 minutes during an incident just tracking down the information the team needed.
Then Firefly arrived
Firefly didn't ask Front Range to start over. More than 800 existing cameras across its three campuses were brought into the platform over the following months, preserving the infrastructure the college already had.
“It was pretty seamless,” McFarland says. “We just verified the names were the same as what we used to have.”
But what made the partnership stick wasn't just the integration. McFarland has worked closely with the Firefly team since installation, giving direct feedback on how the platform should work for officers using it every day.
When something breaks, he says it's typically fixed within a day, or Firefly comes back with a documented plan.
“That's very fast compared to what we're used to,” he says.
For McFarland, the technology ultimately serves a much more human purpose.
“I really want everyone to know they can come over to campus safety,” he says. “We have resources, a shoulder to lean on, ears to talk to.”
Johnson puts it more plainly: “I feel the responsibility to keep every soul on this campus safe.”
What changed
The clearest measure of the new system may be everything Front Range's campus safety team no longer has to do by hand.
Routine safety checks take less manual work. Asset checks that once consumed a full shift can now trigger notifications before equipment such as AEDs or fire extinguishers needs attention.
Training is simpler. McFarland says new officers can learn the system in about five minutes.
“Less,” he adds. “And in my line of work, that's essential. When there's a big incident, you need to not have to think as much, and just know what to click.”
Three campuses can operate as one team. If McFarland is tied up on a scene at Larimer, another campus can help monitor cameras, manage access, take calls, or contact emergency services.
“My Boulder campus team or my Westminster campus team can lock down our buildings, access our cameras, our door access, take phone calls for us, call 911 for us, while we're dealing with a situation,” he says.
Officers spend less time going back to a desk. McFarland estimates that mobile access alone — letting him check a camera or open a door from the field — gives him back an hour or two of his day.
What's next
Front Range is exploring bringing radio communications into the same platform and ways to give local police and EMS live digital access to relevant maps and cameras before they arrive on campus.
It's also testing emerging AI capabilities designed to help surface relevant information faster while keeping people in control.
“It doesn't act on its own,” McFarland says. “Mistakes happen, whether you're human or machine. So it'll notify us, but then we check it first.”
“Essential”
Today, Firefly isn't something Front Range reserves for an emergency.
“It's become essential to how we keep our campus safe,” Johnson says. “We use it on a daily basis. We have it pulled up in each of our campus safety offices.”
McFarland puts it more bluntly.
“If Firefly was gone tomorrow, immediately we wouldn't have camera access, and it would be incredibly difficult to do our jobs,” he says. “So please don't take it away.”
“I'm not devoting my time to checking cameras or access control. I'm actually helping people instead.”
— Will McFarland, Campus Safety Officer
