Teachers, faculty, and students thrive in a culture of safety. School staff need to feel safe to work, and students need to feel safe to learn. Part of ensuring safety is knowing exactly who is on campus. On any given day, a variety of people could be visiting your school:
- Parents dropping off or picking up their students
- Volunteers
- District staff that work in other buildings
- Guest speakers
- Event vendors
- Health professionals
- Contractors
- Delivery drivers
Most schools across the United States have implemented some kind of visitor check-in procedure. Data from the 2019-20 school year showed that 98% of U.S. schools required visitors to sign or check in and wear a badge, but that is essentially where visitor management began and ended.
A safe and secure school environment requires a thorough understanding of who is in your school and why, where they are meant to be, and how long they’ve been there. School visitors play a role in a safe, successful learning environment. Automation can help you protect them along with staff and students.
Volunteers and Visitors Contribute to the Overall Health of a School Community
Ideally, schools should be able to welcome visitors and volunteers safely into their buildings. Tutoring, mentoring, chaperoning field trips, and assisting in the classroom are all tasks where volunteers play a crucial role in supporting the success of students and teachers alike. One report shows that volunteers can be significant resources in helping create a supportive and welcoming environment at schools and facilitating students’ behavior and performance. Volunteers have been found to improve school attendance, grades and test scores, matriculation, behavior, social skills, graduation rates, and higher education numbers.
To reinforce safety and restrict access without compromising the value visitors provide education, visitor management systems should be smoothly integrated into existing security measures.
Safeguards Every School Should Have in Place
The role of community in schools consists of connections between schools and individuals, businesses, and organizations or institutions that leverage community resources and assist students in achieving positive outcomes. Because many schools and school systems are tasked with juggling diverse needs of students, community members help schools meet student needs the school may not be able to address alone. This includes necessary school supplies for students and staff provided by local organizations as well as resources like event programming, food, and activities for the school and the surrounding community. Children are most likely to become avid readers, skilled learners, self-confident, socially adept, respectful, and responsible when they are part of a community of people working together on their behalf.
With the right safety plan, schools can enjoy the benefits volunteers provide while also protecting students, staff, and the community. Automated visitor management systems create a record of every visitor and require visitors to be authorized before they can enter the building. Particularly in cases where someone unaffiliated with the school seeks admission, a visitor management system can help prevent potentially violent incidents. Experts say that improving the monitoring and locating of visitors inside schools can help mitigate the risk of incidents perpetrated by outsiders. Make sure visitor management is a part of your school safety plan.
School visitor management systems enable schools to know who is on campus at all times and to ensure that only safe individuals are permitted.
The Benefits of Automation in Safety
Visitor management systems with automation and locating technology are an investment in safety for the entire school community. Visitor management systems:
Reduce Human Error
An automated visitor management system makes checking visitors in and out highly efficient. Traditional check-in systems, such as sign-in sheets on clipboards, are highly susceptible to human error. Visitors may forget to sign in when they enter the building and write incorrect arrival or departure times. A standardized system for checking in guests ensures that people who don’t (or should not) be present cannot enter the building or designated spaces within it.
Check Every Visitor, Every Time
People visit school campuses every day. Keeping staff safe means you need to know who’s visiting when they’re visiting, and where they’re permitted on campus. The right visitor management system should allow you to easily check in, authenticate, and locate visitors in real time, giving you confidence and peace of mind that only permitted, verified visitors are on your campus at all times.
CENTEGIX Visitor Management automatically synchronizes all check-in and check-out activities with the Web School Manager. This allows school staff to create custom views and export and download data into activity reports. Activity Reports are created in the Web School Manager in the Activity Reports Module. Staff can employ any internet-connected device to access the Web School Manager. When creating custom reports, staff can choose from a variety of filters to get unique data in a short, easy-to-understand report. Examples of these filters include:
- From/to dates
- Visitor/student names
- Occurrences
- Sort filters
Visitor management software empowers staff and administrators to verify guardians every time.
Students are checked out only with vetted guardians. Our visitor management system uses the information provided by a visitor or gathered by a staff member during check-in to scan the United States National Sex Offender Registry for a potential match. Along with checking visitors against the sex offender registry, CENTEGIX Visitor Management can create a custom list of individuals or phrases to be flagged for review during a check-in. The No-go list differs from the sexual offender background check in that school staff members are responsible for adding, editing, and removing names or phrases from the custom No-go list. The No-go list is empty by default for all stations, and school districts tailor this list to fit their needs.
Assist in Reunification
In the event of an emergency, a school can go from calm to chaotic very quickly. Having a reunification plan that assists you in confidently establishing all parties are safe and reunited with approved guardians is imperative to a successful school safety plan. Manual reunification checklist processes are inefficient and can slow down emergency recovery, while an automated visitor management system allows you to know who needs to be accounted for in an instant.
Help with Large Campus Events
Schools are hubs for gatherings. It’s what makes the school community just that—a community. School plays, sporting events, band concerts, and other school events encourage communities to band together and support students.
Consequently, schools need to be prepared for large numbers of visitors. Without assistance, this can be overwhelming for school staff members who already wear so many hats. It’s important that your school performs required background checks and keeps accurate records of everyone who visits. A visitor management system can help handle large crowds without compromising on safety.
Reduce Staff Burnout
Burnout is becoming a common phenomenon in the workplace, especially in education. An automated visitor management system, like a kiosk, leaves no room for error and takes the burden of keeping tabs on all visitor-related information off of overburdened staff.
Automated visitor management systems facilitate the logistical execution of checking people in and out of school. This frees up staff to engage with students and visitors more authentically, encouraging the clear exchange of information, expectations, and instructions after the check-in process has been completed and visitors have been approved. Further, automated visitor management systems can gather the data needed for grant funding reporting, attendance records, and other mandated record-keeping duties—freeing up time for office staff to complete other important tasks.
Bolster Your School’s Safety Plan
Visitor management technology is a critical layer of a school’s multilayered safety plan. It provides the critical information needed to ensure that all visitors to campus are safe and that students can be reunited with approved guardians as soon as possible in emergencies. The best possible visitor management system is the one that integrates into a school’s existing infrastructure and technology. Most schools have a safety plan that includes various measures that work together to ensure student and staff safety, so finding visitor management technology that can operate with existing technology saves time and money.
CENTEGIX Visitor Management: Effective Tools For Safe Campuses
Accurately monitoring student information—like attendance, verified guardians, and location during school hours—is crucial for every school. Educators have access to an array of student and campus data thanks to digital school safety solutions and student information systems like OneRoster and PowerSchool, but without automation (or an administrator with extra time), that data isn’t as actionable as it could be. Implementing innovative technology can automate many school attendance tasks and responsibilities, such as identifying early checkout patterns and warning signs, enhancing and automating security and identity checks for visitors, maintaining visitor location data in case of emergency, and yielding more accurate data for your school safety plan.
CENTEGIX’s innovative visitor management software for tardy student monitoring simplifies the process and ensures that school staff get the information they need to ensure students are present and safe:
- Students are checked in and out using an efficient digital kiosk, which captures this data and makes it available to staff and administrators.
- Students scan their IDs when entering and leaving school.
- The Visitor Management kiosk initiates the check-in or check-out process.
- Students may indicate their reason for arriving late or leaving early.
- request a parent’s signature.
- Take Student photos during check-in and check-out.
- Validate custody by referencing student contact data.
- Staff can customize check-in questions and available answers.
- The kiosk automatically prints a hall pass.
All CENTEGIX Visitor Management data is then uploaded to the Web School Manager.
- Staff can create custom reports.
- Administrators can use this data for reporting purposes.
- Administrators can use this data internally to examine the reasons for absenteeism, tardiness, and early release to better understand and provide support for students.
In 2023, CENTEGIX partners used its Visitor Management to monitor over 16.8 million student transactions, including tardiness and early release. School staff can also customize the lists of who is available on campus.
CENTEGIX Visitor Management, part of the CENTEGIX Safety Platform, is the only visitor management system for schools that syncs real-time data 24/7 with PowerSchool student information system (SIS). CENTEGIX Visitor Management can check Powerschool and other SIS databases and review patterns of early checkout and other useful data to help create a safe environment at school.
Sex offender registry. CENTEGIX’s automated Visitor Management platform uses the information provided by visitors at check-in (with an ID scan) to scan its database for a potential match. If a match is indicated, staff is immediately alerted. Staff review the information before deciding whether to allow or deny entry. Every year CENTEGIX-protected schools check visitors against the sex offender registry, totaling more than 2.2 million searches and resulting in 391 sex offender denials.
Custody battles. CENTEGIX Visitor Management monitors data about students’ custodial guardians. When every visitor is obligated to check in on an automated digital kiosk, staff can examine the relationships between students and visitors and ensure student safety. If the guardian attempting to check a student out of school does not match the record on file, staff is alerted to the discrepancy and can intervene.
Customized No-Go visitor lists. CENTEGIX’s Visitor Management can create custom lists of individuals or phrases to be flagged for review during check-in and check-out. These lists operate similarly to sexual offender background checks, but they are not connected to external databases and they do not require an optical license scanner. These lists empower schools to make their schools safer by denying entry to individuals whom they know to make students and staff less safe. Every year CENTEGIX-protected schools check visitors, resulting in 93 no-go-list denials.
CENTEGIX Safety Platform with Visitor Management: Empowering School Staff with Automation
Visitor Check-in
Visitors and volunteers engage with the CENTEGIX Visitor Management kiosk upon entering the school building. They scan their driver’s license and, if no further vetting is required, a visitor ID badge is printed. The visitor then checks out when leaving campus. Automation ensures staff doesn’t have to check people in and out, saving time for staff who already perform other important tasks to keep the school running smoothly. The automated system also protects school staff, removing them as the only obstacle between an unruly visitor and entry into the school.
Enhanced Visitor Management Makes All Visitors Visible
Rather than hunting room to room or communicating with staff on intercoms, CENTEGIX’s visitor management system, in conjunction with our innovative real-time location mapping technology, pinpoints the specific location of every guest:
- Zone-based authorization available for visitor location assignment
- Locate all types of visitors—volunteers, contractors, parents, visiting guests, and community members—in real-time, visible through live property and building maps
- Historical visitor location details are recorded
Visitor Management Facilitates Accurate Reporting
One easy-to-use dashboard gives you full analysis capability and visibility into all visitor and volunteer activities:
- View visitor analytics to better define visitor policies and approved volunteer and visitor lists.
- Understand trends on campus visitors, volunteers, and contractors with detailed reports on all activities that are easy to filter, customize, and share.
- See the most visited areas of your campus with historical location reports.
- Audit contractor and vendor time that they spend on the job.
Reunification
CENTEGIX Visitor Management enables quick and seamless reunification during and after emergencies. Once fully evacuated, staff and those in your care are marked safe through our proprietary software at the reunification site, providing an accurate, real-time roster of everyone—and more efficiently than a manual paper-and-pencil process. You can then use the software to ensure your students are authorized to leave with their guardians. The software performs a custody check, and collects signatures and timestamps for your records, ensuring all personnel are correctly reunited with the authorized guardian. All data is recorded, which facilitates post-emergency assessment and reporting.
Visitor Management is Critical to a School Safety Plan
CENTEGIX Visitor Management is part of the CENTEGIX Safety Platform. The Safety Platform provides schools with safety and security. The Safety Platform also includes:
- CENTEGIX CrisisAlert mobile panic button empowers staff to instantly request help in the event of an emergency, staff members can press a wearable emergency button to initiate alerts or campus lockdowns.
- CENTEGIX Safety Blueprint is a critical incident mapping tool that directs responders to the precise locations of alerts and school safety assets.
- Reunification tools enhance communication and securely reunite students with parents or designated caregivers after a crisis.
The Safety Platform offers a multi-layered approach to safety that can reduce response time during an emergency and serve as the foundation of any school’s safety plan.
Kristie Brooks, Superintendent at Chattahoochee County Schools in Georgia, states that “With 65% of our population being transient, we can’t know everyone. CENTEGIX Enhanced Visitor Management helps us quickly identify visitors and know where they are, even if we don’t know them personally, and that is a huge relief for our staff. Before the visitor management system and visitor badges, there were no check-ins. We didn’t know if they actually came to campus, or if they did, when and where they went. Now, they have to come into the front office, check-in and we can see where they are and have been, which has offered unexpected upside.”
Every second matters. Set your school up for success in the event that disaster strikes. CENTEGIX is a national leader in developing innovative school safety solutions that help keep students and staff members safe from potential threats.
Click here to learn more about what we can do for your district and to see a demo of the CENTEGIX Safety Platform.