Visitor Management Systems for Schools

The nine-year old girl named Jessica Lunsford who was murdered by a construction employee at her school caused the Jessica Lunsford to get implemented.  In order to comply with the law School districts throughout Florida began to actively implement fingerprinting and screening systems on their properties. A late addition to employee access control systems was the Visitor management system. This interface quickly took front stage as the preferred solution to monitor volunteers, would-be vendors, and visitors.

Handwritten log books, which have long been viewed as ineffective to track or verify visitors were replaced over the past few years, with electronic visitor management systems. The new electronic system had far more impressive capabilities that the basic badging abilities. Its new features spanned workstations to enterprise-wide, networked solutions that enable users to badge, register, and track and administer guests.

The Florida schools districts were drawn to the flexibility of stout visitor management systems to meet their requirements, in compliance with the Jessica Lunsford Act. For example, the numerous public schools of Collier County in Florida carried out the first system-wide, networked visitor administration interface in the state. The school district still had to contend with the thousands of visitors and volunteers who had unfettered access to students even though it had already begun fingerprinting all workers, vendors and regular volunteers in search of violent criminals, sexual predators and drug dealers. Collier County deployed the technology of FastPass to establish security at the front door, simply because it would be impractical and prohibitively expensive to fingerprint every guest.

As soon as the FastPass system initially scans the visitor's ID it automatically starts to fill up the database with data from a Canadian or United States license, passport or military ID. Whether the ID is properly formatted or fake is immediately recognized by the advanced system. Upon finishing this procedure the system then starts to check the name against other internal watch lists such as the national sex offender registry. FastPass takes the visitor's photo and prints a badge if it fails to find a match with any of these lists. Furthermore administrators are allowed to modify the badge to include time and date of entry, areas the guest is permitted to access, badge expiration or any other relevant information through the preset fields option. The system managers can quickly generate reports, single visitor or view the history of a group. Adding on, a guest may not move from building to building, hoping to gain access simply because all the systems are networked together. All what the system will do is consistently and continuously check their identity, determine privileges and present the history of visitations. By robbing them of their anonymity, the FastPass is giving hope to Collier County and promising them that it will act primarily as a frontline deterrent to identify convicted sex offenders. The administrators know they've done their part in keeping their schools safe each time the system produces a hit.