[privacy] High-tech school security is on the rise

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () bsf-llc com>]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-10-09-school-security_x.htm
 
By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
Each morning, the 16,000 students in the Spring Independent School District
in suburban Houston swipe their ID tags as they climb onto the school bus. A
radio frequency tag tracks them, as it does when they arrive at school and
as they leave the building.

Nearly 1,000 cameras watch them all day. Every visitor - parents,
volunteers, the guy who fills the Coke machine - must surrender his or her
driver's license to a secretary who checks it against a national database of
sex offenders. This fall, nearly one in three schools literally trap
visitors inside a "secure vestibule," a bulletproof glass room, until
they're checked out.

Welcome to the brave new world of school security. In an era when deadly
school shootings seem to happen like clockwork, schools are hardening up,
trying unconventional means to deter violence and keep track of students and
adults.

President Bush convenes a school safety summit today in response to a spate
of shootings. But schools have long been beefing up security - often in the
face of diminishing funding - creating "crisis plans" and investing millions
in systems they hope will deter the next deadly incident. 

"If somebody's really determined to get into a school and they have a high
enough caliber weapon, they're going to get in," says Alan Bragg, chief of
Spring's school police. But ID checks and the like are "a huge deterrent" to
most would-be criminals.

And though shootings like those at Columbine High School in 1999 prompted
schools to be on the lookout for violent students, safety experts say
kidnapping and molestation cases also have forced them to pay attention to
adults on campus.

Florida and California now require criminal background checks for anyone
working or regularly visiting a school.

"People need to realize that the day of the open campus is changing," says
Allan Measom, CEO of Raptor Technologies, a Houston firm that sells the
visitor tracking system that Spring uses.

Schools in 19 states use it to stop registered sex offenders at the front
desk. Since the school year began, Measom says, it has ID'd more than 100
offenders, about seven a day. States lost track of about 20 who fled without
telling police.

Raptor actually was born from the collapse of Enron. Measom's firm had built
a Web-based system to track visitors at the Houston energy company, but when
Enron, amid financial scandal, went belly-up in 2002, Measom and a partner
adapted the technology.

They're now in 2,020 schools in 212 districts. After an initial investment
of $1,500, schools pay $432 a year to access the system.

Schools - most often it's the secretaries at the front desk - scan a
visitor's driver's license. The system transmits the visitor's name, date of
birth and photo to Raptor. If the data match those of someone in the sex
offender registry, Raptor e-mails the arrest photo to the school, lining it
up next to the driver's license photo. An onscreen prompt asks: "Is this the
person registering?"

If the photos match and the secretary clicks "Yes," police get an e-mail or
text message. In most cases, the visitor - often a parent - may simply get
restricted access. Many offenders have been stopped from working or
volunteering at schools, and in a few cases, police have tracked down
offenders and arrested them.

More schools may get the technology soon; the U.S. Justice Department
recently chose Raptor as a pilot program for schools nationwide.

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