Page 94 - Security Today, January/February 2019

Visitor Management for a
Safer and More Efficient School
IToday, school security and the safety of students and staff is one of the most debated top- ics in our country. Recent tragedies have highlighted the need for us to take a look at current practices and policies in place so that we can prevent losses in the future. One area of interest that any school, big or small, rural or metro, could benefit from reevaluating is visitor management.
Every day, our schools welcome in parents, guardians, visitors, vendors, volunteers, sub- stitutes and more to participate in school functions. They might sign in on a piece of paper held by a clipboard or in a book, and be asked what their name is, where they’re going, why they are on campus, and the date/ time. Once they have written something down, a handwritten visitor pass might be given out and then they gain access to the most vulnerable parts of a school building.
How often, though, have you noticed a visitor didn’t fill out all the information your school requested? How do you know they put down their actual name and not a fake? Is there any way to double-check that this particular individual is allowed to be on campus and have contact with students? These are just a few questions schools should be asking themselves when reflecting on their current visitor management processes.
Say you do pretty well with collecting the information you do want. That’s great, what happens when you need a report of the vol- unteer hours for the week, tardy students for the day, or the number of visitors for the month? Just like the safety of your school, time is valuable. Traditional visitor manage- ment with a piece of paper does not allow for background checks to be performed or easy report generation, taking time away from other tasks you could be working on.
Benefits of Electronic
Visitor Management
To address these issues that schools nation- wide face, electronic visitor management systems were developed. So, what exactly is an electronic visitor management system?
mplementing and creating a policy for an effective visitor management system
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Simply put, it is an application used to track those coming in and out of your school for easy record keeping. For years now, compa- nies have been providing electronic systems that go beyond collecting the basic informa- tion of a visitor’s name, date and time to pro- vide a comprehensive view of the traffic your school receives and provide an extra level of security when needed.
Increasing safety for your school can begin with scanning the licenses of all your visitors. By scanning the 2D barcode on the back of a valid driver’s license to gather the needed information, like full name and date of birth, an electronic visitor management system can search for a matching sex offend- er record and alert you to take the appropri- ate steps needed if a match is found. Scan- ning licenses has another benefit as well: You’ll be keeping out all the visitors who
attempt try to sign in under a fake name because fake IDs won’t scan when the 2D barcode is presented.
Similarly to how a visitor management system can check for potential sex offenders, it can also help you detect custody issues and other banned persons. It is not all that uncommon these days for there to be restric- tions on who is allowed to meet with a stu- dent or sign them out. By creating a database of custody issues, your school can easily stay on top of who has access to visit students and sign them out early without having to dig through files.
In addition to scanning licenses, schools have the option of capturing a live photo of the visitor when they check in, and ensure that photo is accurate with the use of face detec- tion. If an incident happens on campus after a visitor signs in a student might not recall all