An important element of any school safety plan is visitor management. Each season, schools see a variety of visitors, whether parents, volunteers, contractors, or other vendors. It is crucial to be aware of who is in the building at all times.
Do your school safety solutions allow you to:
- Know the location of every visitor on campus?
- Control access to school facilities?
- Maintain records of who visits campus?
- Enact an immediate emergency response if needed?
Effective Measures For Proactive School Safety Plans
The average school has over 500 students, while the largest schools in the U.S. have over 2,000 students enrolled, not to mention teachers and other staff. Structured preventative strategies pave the way to enhancing safety for everyone on campus.
No safety plan is complete without including all potential individuals on campus. It is important for schools and school districts to not only take into account staff and students when drafting school safety plans, but to assess their procedures for campus visitors as well.
By utilizing innovative visitor management technology, schools can better enforce visitor entry requirements and have the ability to locate visitors within the school campus in the event of a crisis.
What steps can your school district take to tighten up visitor management and ensure the safety of students, teachers, and staff?
Automating Visitor Management
An automated visitor management system does much more than a clipboard and lined paper. Automating the visitor check-in process can significantly improve the accountability of visitors by:
- providing easy access to visitor data for administrative staff and security personnel
- locating and monitoring repeat visitors for security purposes
An automated system utilizes technology to make your school safer. Staff can run visitors’ names across various lists, such as sex offender registries, at the door, ensuring they don’t unknowingly allow someone dangerous into the school. The system can also store information about custody of children, ensuring no student is released to a guardian they are not supposed to go with.
CENTEGIX: School Safety Solutions that Meet Accountability and User Management Needs
CENTEGIX’s Enhanced Visitor Management system goes far beyond the traditional clipboard and sign-in sheet approach. This enhanced visitor management system automatically collects data, compares it to existing resources for school safety, and monitors visitors’ exact location from the moment they enter the school until they return their visitor badge and leave.
By integrating Ident-A-Kid’s proven visitor management system, which has been in development for over two decades, with CENTEGIX’s innovative CrisisAlert technology, CENTEGIX has created a school safety resource that can meet the needs of any school district, from the smallest rural school to the largest, most populated, urban school district.
CENTEGIX Visitor Management: At the Front Door
Let’s walk through how CENTEGIX’s Visitor Management system works to secure your campus from start to finish. The system can be set up as a kiosk where a staff member checks people in, or people can check themselves in.
First, the system scans any visitor names against sex offender lists, custom banned reports created by the school or district, and custody issue checks created in conjunction with local systems. If there are any issues with the visitor, the system can send a discreet and immediate notification to pre-selected staff members.
This ensures a rapid response to the issue and prevents front desk staff members from being alone with someone becoming agitated to the point of aggression. The system gives those working the school entrance the tools they need to make an informed decision about who to allow inside.
CENTEGIX Visitor Management System: During the Visit
Once a visitor is approved to enter the school, they receive a printed sticker with their name, photo, and information, making them easily identifiable as approved visitors to staff and students throughout their visit. School staff don’t need to guess whether a person they haven’t seen before should be in the school. The sticker communicates that the visitor has been approved after a background check.
With the CENTEGIX Enhanced Visitor Management feature, visitors receive a yellow visitor badge on a lanyard that provides real-time data with the visitor’s exact location to administration and emergency responders if the situation calls for it. This unique feature provides the location of visitors during the time they spend on campus and ensures everyone is accounted for in case of emergency.
The yellow badge will notify administrators if a visitor enters a forbidden area. CENTEGIX’s school safety resources are adopted by every staff member at the school or district, so if anybody notices a person without a badge who is not a staff member or student, they know someone has bypassed the entry process.
After the Visit: How CENTEGIX’s School Safety Solutions Gather Data to Keep Schools Safe
When a visitor’s time is over, they check out where they entered and return their visitor badge. This step allows school administration to confirm who is in the school and notify security if a visit is lasting longer than expected. But even after that visitor badge is turned in, the data from the CENTEGIX Administrator Dashboard can be utilized by school administration to inform policies and school safety plans.
From the moment a visitor checks in, CENTEGIX’s Visitor Management system captures and stores data such as:
- visitor’s contact information
- notes from school staff members
- attachments such as photographs and background checks
If an alert is sent about a visitor or potential visitor, the system captures the alert, who responded to it, and what actions were taken. Automating this record-keeping ensures school staff can focus on addressing the emotional, physical, or mental aftermath of a tense situation rather than having to stop to document the incident or risk the loss of information due to the stress of the moment. It ensures no visitor-related data is lost.
The platform allows customizable user management capabilities that control access and permissions to ensure data is kept private and only available for authorized access. School districts can share this data to continuously improve school safety plans using lessons learned.
Implementing CENTEGIX’s school safety solutions improve the efficiency of managing everyday needs, such as attendance and visitor management, while also offering the best support and most rapid response to emergencies. Learn more here and then schedule a demo with a CENTEGIX specialist.
