October 2008 — Security Supplement
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Can I Come In?
New access-control devices are an important addition to the sophisticated work that one Texas school district is doing to protect its students.
"Spring ISD began its own police force 18 years ago," says Bragg, who has served as the district's chief of police since the force's inception. "We are sworn law officers who work for the school district doing full-time policing. We're a 24/7/365 department that constantly studies ways to improve the safety of staff and students."
It's a big job, one that has become far more challenging in recent years as a result of the district's explosive growth. In this decade alone, enrollment has about doubled in Spring ISD, from 16,000 to more than 32,000 students, 25,000 of whom are bused to their respective schools. To ensure that the right students get on the right bus, about five years ago the district implemented the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Students would enter the bus and pass by a card reader, which picked up the information on their tags and transmitted it via a GPS-enabled cell phone device to a district server, where any school could then pull up the data to see the bus' location, who was on it, and which students got off it in what neighborhood. Bragg says the program was successful for a few years, but the cost of the hardware and keeping up with updates prohibited the district from using the system over the long run.
The past year and a half has been spent developing what Bragg calls "the next generation of R F I D," which Spring ISD is piloting this fall in three of its schools and on about 40 buses. It's a more far-reaching effort at student monitoring, employing a combination GPS/RFID card that can track a student for up to 300 feet from each of several modules installed throughout a school.
The card was developed by the San Antonio-based Wade-Garcia & Associates, with input from the district. "We told them what we wanted it to do," Bragg says, explaining that the district needed a card that could monitor students' comings and goings not only on and off buses, but in and around campus as well. The multipurpose card, which displays the user's image, is being used for access control, bus riding, cafeteria purchases, and checking out library books. "We took it to the next level," Bragg says.
An important benefit of the card is better record keeping. Bragg explains that students can be wrongly marked absent if not in their classrooms when roll is called. This new RFID card can verify that they were on another part of the campus at the time so districts don't miss out on state and federal funding that is tied to attendance levels.
