Can I Come in? New Access-Control Devices Are an Important Addition to the Sophisticated Work That One Texas School District Is Doing to Protect Its Students
Ralph C. Jensen · T.H.E. Journal Technological Horizons in Education · 2008
TWENTY MILES NORTH of Houston, Alan Bragg keeps watch over Independent School District. Spring ISD began its own police force 18 years ago, says Bragg, who has served as district's chief of police since force's inception. We are sworn law officers who work for school district doing full-time policing. We're a 24/7/365 department that constantly studies ways to improve safety of staff and students. It's a big job, one that has become far more challenging in recent years as a result of district's explosive growth. In this decade alone, enrollment has about doubled in ISD, from 16,000 to more than 32,000 students, 25,000 of whom are bused to their respective schools. To ensure that right students get on right bus, about five years ago district implemented use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Students would enter bus and pass by a card reader, which picked up information on their tags and transmitted it via a GPS-enabled cell phone device to a district server, where any school could then pull up data to see bus' location, who was on it, and which students got off it in what neighborhood. Bragg says program was successful for a few years, but cost of hardware and keeping up with updates prohibited district from using system over long run. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The past year and a half has been spent developing what Bragg calls the next generation of RFID, which ISD is piloting this fall in three of its schools and on about 40 buses. It's a more far-reaching effort at student monitoring, employing a combination GPS/RFID card that can track a student for up to 300 feet from each of several modules installed throughout a school. The card was developed by San Antonio-based Wade-Garcia & Associates (www.wade-garcia.com), with input from district. We told them what wanted it to do, Bragg says, explaining that district needed a card that could monitor students' comings and goings not only on and off buses, but in and around campus as well. The multipurpose card, which displays user's image, is being used for access control, bus riding, cafeteria purchases, and checking out library books. We took it to next level, Bragg says. An important benefit of card is better record keeping. Bragg explains that students can be wrongly marked absent if not in their classrooms when roll is called. This new card can verify that they were on another part of campus at time districts don't miss out on state and federal funding that is tied to attendance levels. Bragg says that being able to pinpoint students' location inside school can be crucial in a crisis. If there's a fire or an explosion in a corridor, or there is an intruder, he says, we know if there are students trapped in that corridor. The individual ID numbers embedded in each card are viewable by Bragg's staff. RFID would tell us who is at risk and also which students are safe in other parts of building, Bragg explains, so could have law enforcement and first responders get those persons to closest evacuation route or door. To me that's a huge, critical thing. Visitor Monitoring As district hardens against outside influences, its effort to eliminate or at least reduce potential external threats has led to placement of nearly 1,700 cameras in schools; by January there will be as many as 2,000. Sony (www.sony.com) and Dedicated Micros (www.dedicatedmicros.com) cameras snap images, which are captured on Dedicated Micros DVRs. In addition, district has implemented a visitor tracking system from Raptor Technologies (www.raptorware.com) called V-soft that essentially acts as a digital gatekeeper. Every visitor to a school--whether parent, volunteer, or vendor--must check in at front desk, surrendering his driver's license to a secretary, who checks it against a national database of sex offenders. …