Last January, an Ad-Hoc Committee of the Board of Education
began researching sensible changes which would make our children safer. We quickly learned that the key concept in
school security is not ‘prevention,’ but rather ‘moments matter.’ The experts taught us you can’t prevent an incident from arriving at your doorstep; but the longer
it takes for any incident to unfold, the less damage is done and the sooner it ends. We looked at the factors that made us ‘soft
targets’ -- such as unlocked doors, ready access points, and poor line-of-sight. Our police department and fire department
generously spent time helping us through a SWOT Analysis – a study of our
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Orange didn’t go crazy with new initiatives. With almost every installation, I can
honestly say we either played catch-up to, or surpassed, the security measures already
existing in newer school building, and even many of our parents’ workplaces. We concentrated on the principle ‘moments
matter,’ and planned strategies that either made unobserved access difficult or
lessened the response-time of emergency personnel. We concentrated our efforts on identifying visitors
(with security monitors and software), improving our alert systems (with
surveillance cameras and rapid-call notification), and slowing down illegitimate
access (by locking exterior and classroom doors and adding sally-ports). Some of this security is ready for the start
of school; some of it is still coming.
Our new security monitors will check visitors in and out,
and the computer software they will use, School
Gate Guardian, adds an additional layer of safety. With a quick scan of a driver’s license, the
software makes a digital record of our visitors and matches them to a child in
our system. If there is a custody
problem, the software alerts the monitor.
Parents may grant permission
for others to take home their children, but no one can take their children from
school without their permission.
Just last week, from a pool of 109 applicants, we hired four
new security monitors for the 2 – 9:00 p.m. shift. Earlier in the summer, we moved our current
monitors to newly-created day shifts, beginning at 7 a.m. This week we’ll order their neon shirts and
plan their professional development which will include everything from conflict
resolution … to CPR and defibrillator training … to management of the School Gate Guardian software.
The hardware we’ve purchased was also carefully
planned. This week, we finished
installing a rapid-response system with several important, inter-connected
components. We can now keep every exterior school door locked at all
times. A proximity card reader, located
outside the school, is personalized to each teacher’s ID and will open locked exterior
doors. The teachers will use their ID cards
to open the front door before school and the back door after recess. The same system has a powerful camera, and
the security monitors or office personnel can ask someone they don’t know to hold
an ID in front of the camera so they can read it.
An additional piece of equipment, sometimes referred to as a
‘panic button,’ puts the school in lock-down.
With a simple push of a single button, the fire doors close, a lock-down
announcement goes out over the PA system, and an emergency call is made to the
police. There are both stationary and portable buttons. In addition, the new video surveillance
cameras (not the same camera described above) will allow the police to monitor
the exterior of the buildings (the playgrounds, loading docks, parking lots,
etc.) and the interior corridors, gym, and cafeteria from their cars.
I realize the new security measures have made access to the
schools a little more difficult for parents,
too. I also realize that the chance of
a significant emergency is infinitesimally small. But, all of the security measures we’ve taken
will protect Orange in other ways as well.
We need locked classroom doors, during lunch and recess, if we are to encourage
kids and teachers to bring their Kindles and iPads to school. We need interior and exterior cameras to
prevent vandalism, to apprehend vandals, or to determine the cause of
accidents. We need to record who takes
our students home and when they left the building.
This is a new world our children live in; but as adults, it
is our responsibility to confidently surround them in reassurances that keep
their childhoods intact.
