A building designed to be open, controlled for four hours a week.
Every other property on this site manages a steady daily flow of people. A house of worship manages two states (locked and empty, or open and full), and almost all the risk sits in the transition between them.
Two states, and the twenty minutes on either side
Conventional access control assumes a stream of credentialed people arriving all day. That model does not describe your building at all.
For most of the week your building is locked and lightly occupied: an office, a caretaker, a class. Then for a few hours it is deliberately open, with people arriving at once, doors propped for strollers and wheelchairs, and a greeter rather than a reader at the entrance. Then it empties again. The security design has to serve both states and, crucially, the transitions, because the highest-exposure moments are the twenty minutes before a service when the doors are opened and the twenty minutes after when everyone is on the sidewalk.
What that means concretely is that a card reader on the main sanctuary door is close to useless during a service and essential outside one. So the standard arrangement we build is: scheduled unlock on the main entrance for the service window, credentialed entry at one staff or side door the rest of the time, a staffed greeter position during the open state with an intercom and remote release for latecomers, and door position monitoring on every other exterior opening so the building knows when the kitchen door or the basement entrance is opened at all.
The greeter position is where most of the money should go, and it is not a hardware line item. It is a monitor showing the exterior approach and the entrance, a release button, and a phone. The single most valuable technical thing you can give a volunteer at that desk is a camera view of the approach (the sidewalk and the path to the door), not a view of the door itself. Seeing someone at the door is a few seconds of warning. Seeing them coming is closer to thirty.
The perimeter cameras follow the same logic. The valuable positions are the approach paths, the parking area, the side alley, the dumpster area and any yard door, framed at head height where people walk, not mounted on the roof looking down. A roof camera covers area and identifies nobody.
Six positions, in the order they usually earn their cost
Written as a build order, so a phased or partially funded project starts with the ones that matter most.
- The approach to the main entrance, at head height. Identification grade, tight enough that a face fills a useful part of the frame. If you buy one camera, this is it. Mounted at 8 to 9 feet on the facade or under a canopy rather than at roof level.
- The main entrance interior, looking out. This is the greeter’s view. It will fight daylight through glass, so it needs true multi-exposure wide dynamic range and its own infrared switched off: infrared through glass reflects straight back and returns a white sheet, which is the single most common reason these cameras are useless after dark.
- Every other exterior door, with a contact. The kitchen door, the basement entrance, the yard gate, the door to the school wing. Camera plus door position switch, with an alarm when any of them opens outside scheduled hours or is held open. Most incidents at these buildings involve a door that was open for an ordinary reason.
- The parking area and the path from it. People are most exposed between the car and the door. This is a lighting problem before it is a camera problem. Add white light and the camera specification gets cheaper, not more expensive.
- The side alley, the dumpster area and any recessed doorway. The places somebody can stand unobserved from the street. These are detection positions, not identification, and analytics that flag loitering after hours genuinely help here.
- The sanctuary interior, only if your community has agreed to it. This is a governance decision, not a technical one, and it should be made by the board before it is designed. Where it is agreed, cover entrances and aisles rather than the congregation, and never with audio.
How to get a scope that a grant budget can actually use
Federal and state nonprofit security grant programs are a major source of funding for this work in New York, and they change what a proposal needs to look like. We want to be precise about our role: we do not write, administer or submit grant applications, and we are not grant consultants. What we do is produce a scope and a price in the shape a grant budget needs.
Those programs generally fund target hardening, the physical and electronic measures that make a facility harder to attack. The categories typically include door and window hardening, locks and door hardware, security film, fencing, gates and bollards, exterior lighting, access control equipment, video surveillance equipment, alarm and notification systems, and in some cycles contracted security personnel, training, planning and exercises. Our work sits squarely inside two or three of those categories and touches a couple more.
Two hard cautions, because getting either wrong is expensive. First, eligible cost categories, award ceilings and the period of performance change from cycle to cycle. Read the current notice of funding opportunity or ask the state agency administering it, and do not take any vendor’s summary as authority, including ours. Second, these programs are typically reimbursement-based, meaning the congregation carries the cost first and is repaid after. That changes the cash-flow conversation entirely and should be settled with your treasurer before anything is ordered.
What we put in a grant-ready scope: every item on its own line with a unit price and quantity; equipment separated from labor; each line mapped to the kind of category a target-hardening budget uses; a stated pricing basis and validity, because scopes written in one cycle are often executed in the next; and exclusions stated in plain language so nothing arrives later as an unbudgeted surprise your award cannot absorb.
If the money is federal, the equipment brand is part of the compliance
This is the point most congregations discover too late, and it is worth the paragraph. NDAA FY2019 §889 names Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision and Dahua, along with their subsidiaries and affiliates, as covered telecommunications and video surveillance equipment, and the same companies appear on the FCC Covered List. Federal award conditions routinely flow that restriction down to grant recipients. Spending an award on covered equipment is therefore a genuine problem, not a technicality.
The trap is that a substantial volume of camera hardware is sold under brand names with no visible connection to those manufacturers but built on their platforms. So the check has to be done per model, and no honest integrator will make a blanket claim about an entire catalog. We will verify the specific models we propose, and if you already have cameras installed we will tell you what they actually are.
The measures that do not make a building feel like a checkpoint
| Measure | What it changes for a visitor | What it changes for you |
|---|---|---|
| Camera on the approach path | Nothing. Most people never notice it | The greeter gets roughly thirty seconds of warning instead of three, which is the entire difference in a response |
| Scheduled unlock for service hours | Nothing: the door is simply open when it should be | Removes the failure mode where somebody forgets to lock up, and gives you a log of when the building actually opened and closed |
| Door contacts on secondary doors | Nothing | You learn which doors get propped, when, and by whom. Almost always the most useful data in the first month |
| Staffed greeter with intercom and release | A person says hello. Most communities find this improves the arrival rather than hardening it | A human decision point that no electronic system replaces, backed by a view and a release button |
| Exterior lighting improvements | The path from the parking area is brighter | Every camera in that area gets dramatically better and cheaper. Lighting is usually the highest-return line in the whole budget |
| Credentialed staff entrance | Nothing for congregants: it is not the door they use | Staff and volunteers get in without a key that can be copied, and access is revoked from a browser when someone’s role changes |
| Locked main door during services | A significant change, and often the wrong one | This is where openness and security genuinely conflict. In most buildings a staffed open door beats a locked one, because a locked door still opens for whoever knocks |
Ranked by how much security they add relative to how much they change the experience of arriving. The top rows are the ones we recommend first for exactly that reason.
Egress in an assembly space, and a landmarked facade
A sanctuary is an assembly occupancy, and that sets a hard limit on what can be done to its doors. Exit doors have to open from the inside with one motion, without a key, a code or special knowledge. Where panic hardware is required, its operation must release any electric lock. And delayed-egress locking is not permitted in assembly occupancies under the model code, so any proposal that includes a fifteen-second delay on a sanctuary exit is not something we would install regardless of who asked for it. The correct answer for a door you want to control during a service is an alarmed contact and a person, not a lock.
The second constraint is architectural. A great many New York houses of worship are individual landmarks or sit inside historic districts, and anything visible from the street on a designated facade (a camera housing, surface conduit, an exterior reader, a change to entry door hardware) requires Landmarks review before a Buildings filing. On a corner building the side elevation counts too. That review is weeks, and it belongs in your project schedule rather than arriving as a surprise between a grant award and its deadline.
In practice, landmark constraints are workable and mostly shape how rather than whether. Cameras mounted under an existing canopy or within an existing recess, equipment finished to match the surrounding material, cable routed through existing penetrations rather than new ones, and low-profile housings all tend to fare better in review than a large surface-mounted assembly on a stone facade. Getting that resolved on paper before the board votes on a product saves a cycle.
Common questions
We received a security grant. Can you help us spend it?
We can give you the scope and the price in the form a grant budget needs: itemized lines with quantities and unit prices, equipment separated from labor, each line mapped to the kind of category a target-hardening budget uses, a stated pricing basis, and exclusions written plainly. That is usually what the award administration needs from a vendor.
What we will not do is present ourselves as grant consultants. We do not write applications, we do not administer awards, and we are not the right people to tell you whether a particular cost is eligible in your cycle. Eligible categories, ceilings and periods of performance change from cycle to cycle, and the authority is the current notice of funding opportunity and the agency administering it in New York, not a contractor’s summary.
The practical advice we would give: get the survey and the itemized scope done early, before the application deadline rather than after the award, because a scope produced under time pressure is the one that gets items wrong. And confirm with your treasurer how reimbursement timing works for your award, since these programs commonly repay after the spend rather than funding it up front.
Can we lock the sanctuary doors during a service?
Not in the way people usually mean. Exit doors in an assembly space have to open from the inside with a single motion, without a key or special knowledge, and delayed-egress hardware is not permitted in assembly occupancies. Anything that would keep people inside is off the table, and we would decline to install it.
What is available is controlling entry while leaving exit completely free. The doors latch behind people, a greeter is stationed at the entrance with a view of the approach and a release button, and every other exterior door is monitored so you know if one is opened. From the inside, every one of those doors still opens instantly for anyone.
It is worth being honest about what this achieves. A locked entrance door with a greeter is meaningfully better than an open one, because it forces a pause and a decision at a controlled point. It is not a barrier, and no door hardware is. The measures that add the most in these buildings are the ones that add warning time (the camera on the approach, the lighting, the person who is looking) rather than the ones that add resistance at the door.
Our building is landmarked. Can we put cameras on the facade?
Usually yes, with review first. Anything visible from the street on a designated facade needs Landmarks approval before a Buildings filing, and the two lighter permit routes cover most of what a camera and access installation involves. What we would flag on the survey is which of your proposed positions are street-visible, including the side elevation if you are on a corner, which surprises people.
Designs that go through most easily tend to share features: mounted within an existing recess, under an existing canopy, or on a non-original element rather than on original stone; finished to blend rather than to contrast; cable routed through existing penetrations; and a low-profile housing rather than a large surface assembly with visible conduit. Where a position genuinely cannot be approved, there is often an interior mount looking out through glass. That works, provided the infrared is switched off and external light is added, because infrared through glazing returns a white sheet.
Build the review time into the schedule at the start. If your funding has a deadline, that is the item most likely to threaten it.
How do we control entry without making people feel searched?
Put the technology where it is invisible and the people where they are welcoming. Almost everything on our recommended list (the approach camera, the door contacts, the scheduled unlock, the lighting, the credentialed staff door) is unnoticeable to a congregant walking in. None of it changes the arrival experience at all.
What congregants notice is the person at the door. Most communities find that a greeter improves the arrival rather than hardening it, because it converts a security position into a hospitality one. The technology’s job is to give that person information (a view of who is coming up the path, a button to release the door, a phone), not to replace them.
The measures that do change the feel are the visible ones: a locked main door, a bag check, a uniformed guard. Those are community decisions rather than technical ones, and they should be made by your board on their merits. Our advice is only that they should not be the first thing bought, because the invisible measures deliver more per dollar and are far easier to live with.
Do we need someone watching the monitors all the time?
No, and a system that requires it will fail, because nobody watches monitors for long. Design for two modes instead. During service hours, the greeter has a live view of the approach. That is watching with a purpose and a short duration, and it works. The rest of the week, nobody watches anything; the system records, and it notifies.
Notification is where modern analytics genuinely earn their place. Object-classifying detection distinguishes a person from a car from a swaying branch and filters the overwhelming majority of the false alarms that made older motion detection unusable. A rule like “person in the yard between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.” sent to two phones is far more useful than a screen in an office nobody occupies at night.
Be realistic about the limits when it is specified: analytics need enough pixels on the subject and a reasonably horizontal view, so a camera mounted high and looking steeply down will classify poorly. That is a siting decision made at survey, not a setting changed later.
The building is used by a preschool during the week. Does that change the design?
Yes, and it should be raised at the survey rather than after. A preschool operating in your building brings its own entrance requirements, its own pickup authorization list that changes frequently, and a set of egress considerations that apply to the spaces it uses. It also usually means a different set of people needs credentialed access to a different set of doors on a different schedule, which is exactly what an access system with defined door groups and schedules is for.
The design implication is separation. The preschool’s credentials should open the preschool’s doors during the preschool’s hours, and nothing else. Your staff’s credentials should be independent of theirs. Both should be administrable by their own people, so the preschool director can add and remove access without going through your office.
It is also worth reading our schools and daycare page alongside this one, because the classroom door hardware question (which lockdown devices are legal and which are not) applies to that part of your building rather than to the sanctuary.
Work that usually comes with this
Security Camera Installation
New IP camera systems for buildings, storefronts, offices and homes.
Access Control Installation
Complete door-control systems, from a single door to a multi-building portfolio.
Intercom Installation
New audio or video entry systems, wired or IP, sized to the building.
Commercial Security Cameras
Retail, restaurant, warehouse and office systems, including NDAA-compliant hardware.
Schools & Daycare
Controlled vestibules, visitor screening and lockdown hardware.
Gate & Parking Access Control
Vehicle gates, garage doors, parking control and the loops and safeties that go with them.
Ask for an itemized scope, not a package price.
Tell us the building, the number of exterior doors and whether you are working to a funding deadline. You’ll get a line-item scope you can budget against.
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