District to roll out stringent sign-in system
School visitors will have to swipe photo ID, be checked against national sex offender database
For years, visitors and volunteers entering most public schools in Santa Fe only had to write their names on a front-desk registry.
At Santa Fe High School this year, visitors have been introduced to a more sophisticated check-in system that produces an identification sticker featuring the visitor’s photo, gleaned from a driver’s license.
Anyone caught on campus without such an ID tag stuck to their coat or sweater is marched promptly to the school’s Student Services Center by a vigilant security guard and ordered to get one from secretary Aggie Bustos. Even a parent who makes frequent visits to the school can’t slip by a guard’s watchful eye without a tag.
What a Santa Fe High visitor might not know is that in a few months, just before the speedy apparatus spits out his or her ID tag, it will make a quick scan to make sure the name and birth date on the visitor’s driver’s license does not match any information logged in a national sex offender list.
And not just at Santa Fe High. The district plans to install the digital visitor-management system at all of its school sites this spring in an effort to increase security and improve efficiency for school staff.
“We want to implement an electronic system that does away with this [sign-in process] and makes it easier for staff at all schools to monitor this and make
sure information is recorded appropriately,” Gabe Romero, the district’s head of security and safety, told the Santa Fe School board during a recent presentation.
By simply scanning driver’s licenses, the district can “determine whether it’s appropriate for the visitors to be in the school or if they have to be escorted while in the schools,” he said.
Under the current sign-in process, said Romero and Superintendent Veronica García, school employees have no way of knowing whether a visitor is being truthful about who they are. Nor is there an easy way to ensure the person is not a risk to children.
The more stringent method of keeping watch over who gains access to public school students is growing in popularity, with an increasing number of school districts around the nation adopting such digital systems, according to media reports.
Santa Fe Public Schools will contract with Raptor Technologies of Houston at a cost of about $70,000 to get the system up and running and another $10,000 a year to maintain it, García said.
Under the new system, visitors will swipe their driver’s license — or another type of identification card — through a device similar to a credit card machine. The device will check information on the ID against the U.S. Justice Department’s National Sex Offender Public Registry.
The machine will then print the sticky photo ID — which announces the visitor’s specific destination and the name of the school — for the visitor to wear while on campus.
Romero said the district will train its employees to use the new system, which is expected to be partially implemented within 60 days.
As with all types of technology, digital visitor-management systems come with some risks of their own. At least one school district in Ohio discarded a program similar to Raptor’s after it mistakenly identified people as sex offenders.
García said employees in the Santa Fe district “will have to use common sense and conduct due diligence and not falsely accuse people.
“But we are not supposed to leave children unattended with offenders,” he said. “We have to use a little more caution.”
Contact Robert Nott at 505-986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com.