Students and Staff Respond to ID Scanner Implementation
Westside plans on expanding the uses of ID scanners in the coming school years.
At the end of the first semester, students at Westside High School were introduced to a new security feature at the West Lot doors: ID scanners. These scanners allow the school to know who is entering and leaving the building and if they are allowed to do so given their schedule, while also keeping students and staff safe from any potential threats.
Principal Jay Opperman said that the concept of ID scanners was first proposed as a possible defense measure for the unlikely event of a serious emergency within the building.
“The main idea [of the ID scanners] is so that we actually have a better accounting, so who’s in the building and out of the building throughout the day,” Opperman said. “It’s really related to being better prepared for things that we hope [we] wouldn’t want to have to be prepared for. If we had a significant emergency, like if we had to evacuate the building or if we had to go into a lockdown, we just want to be able to see, on the backside, a report of who is actually checked in and out. So it’s purely for a safety reason.”
Opperman said that plans of implementing ID scanners were first proposed last year, with hopes of finding an easy way to check students in and out through an app.
“We started discussing it last year, [we] reached out to a software company to see if there was a fairly easy way through an app to scan and record, basically through web pages and databases, [in] real time who was in and out of the building,” Opperman said.
Despite the scanners being in only a few spots currently, Opperman said they hope to expand the use of them around the building in the coming years.
“Currently, we have [scanners] at the main door and the west door,” Opperman said. We have talked about, say [during] an independent mod if you went to [the] English World Language IMC, that you can just scan in. [Say] there’s an emergency and we had to account for people, we could say, ‘I know [a student] checked into English IMC at 9:20 today.’ It’s really out of trying to continue to be more safe. In line with a year or two ago [when] we added the secure entryway, we’re just trying to make sure we’re doing things to keep both our students and staff as safe as possible so they can focus on learning.”
Westside High School Resource Officer Jeff Kilgore said that the ID scanners are currently in their testing phase, with hopes of making them as helpful as possible by next semester.
“It was my idea [to implement the scanners], so I feel pretty good about it,” Kilgore said. “Right now they’re just in the testing phase, it’s going to take probably another semester to get this dialed in, but next year it should be fairly complete. [It’s] good for the school, [and] it’s another safety precaution that we’ve added.”
In hopes of keeping students safe, Kilgore said that using the scanners will allow the school to manage any possible safety threats or critical events.
“The reason that we added it was really for two reasons,” Kilgore said. “There’s more to it than just scanning in and out [of] the doors. In order to defeat an active shooter or any kind of thing like that, you have to manage the entry and exits, so this is a way to do that… [The scanners] will tell us how many kids are in the building, bottom line. It’ll tell us how many kids are in the building at [a specific] time now, and that’s good for me [and] that’s good for the school because that’s what they have to do in a critical incident, they have to provide that information. So now they can do that at the touch of a button.”
In addition to scanning in and out, Kilgore said that the district has begun conversations about students wearing lanyards with their student IDs on them to let administration know that they belong in the building.
“We haven’t discussed this fully yet,” Kilgore said. “We have had, in the past, students that have come in that were intruders from other schools, so this gives us another way to identify that you actually go to school here.”
In the near future, Kilgore said that the use of the IDs will expand from just beyond checking in and out of the building.
“We’ve also made it to where [the ID scanners] are going to help with other aspects, not just the security aspect,” Kilgore said. “By the time this thing is up and functional, we’ll have kids scanning into IMCs, the library. There are some other things we could do with the system with lunches and the business office and everything like that, [but] we haven’t fully developed that yet. There are some things we can do with the scheduler app that is about two years away, so there is a lot we can do with this system. Right now though, we’re just trying to figure out the entry/exit process.”
While Kilgore said that the implementation of the scanners is overall to benefit the students and keep everyone in the building safe, junior Abdullah Rustamov said that he likes the change due to its convenience.
“I think [ID scanning is] more convenient honestly, because whenever you were late they had to search your name in the system and write your name down, but now it’s just a scan and go,” Rustamov said.
Regarding an improvement in safety, Rustamov said that he feels that the building has always been relatively safe.
“I don’t know if the building has ever been not-safe, but if [scanning] makes it easier to identify if a student is actually a student, then I guess [it’s worthwhile],” Rustamov said.
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