WOODLAND — Visitors to Woodland Intermediate School this year have a few extra steps to go through before they’re allowed into the school.
First off, they have to enter through the office, now that all other doors are locked. Once in the office, visitors have to hand over their driver’s license to have a school office staffer run a quick background check.
It’s something more districts are trying in hopes of making schools safer. This year, the Camas School District also implemented a pilot program at Camas High School to conduct the same background checks on all visitors.
The systems in Woodland and Camas aren’t conducting full background checks, though.
“Our primary focus is to check for registered sex offenders,” Woodland Intermediate School Principal Steve Carney said. “We still ask for full background checks for volunteers, because they could end up in the school with a student unsupervised. With a visitor, they’re not going to go anywhere unsupervised. We have so many visitors and you just don’t know. We have a sign-in sheet, but sometimes you can’t read what people write. This tracks everyone who comes into the school.”
Carney said keeping track of everyone in the building is a good idea; if there’s an emergency, he and the staff know who exactly is around. It also helps him keep a record of which volunteers are coming to school the most.
The school uses a system from Raptor Technologies in which a school staffer in the front office will take a visitor’s license and run it through the scanner. Within seconds, the background check is done, and if the visitor is approved, he or she receives a sticker with a picture of their license on it to wear while at the school. School employees are trained to look for those stickers on any visitors walking around the hallways.
If a visitor’s license is flagged, a note pops up on the office computer and Carney receives a text message. The school staffer conducting the background check is supposed to press a button that locks the door leading from the office to the rest of the school.
“If they’re in the building, I’m probably calling the police at that point,” Carney said.
In Camas, school district officials decided to start using the system at the high school because so many of the students walking around campus throughout the day, whether it’s because of students coming and going to the Running Start program or Cascadia Tech Academy, students leaving to go to work or simply students walking between portable classrooms.
“Having a completely locked-down facility was not an option,” said Brian Wilde, dean of students at Camas High School. “We had to enhance safety with open campus concepts.”
Wilde said the district started looking into options in the spring and decided to go with the sex offender registry check in August. He added that there are “a lot of eyes in the district” on the pilot program to see how the system works and if it’s worth expanding both in how it’s used and where it’s used.
“Because we’re in a pilot phase with it, we’re trying to understand the system and the convenience for our families and for our community,” he said. “There is the ability for us to do a more robust background check. There are also limitations with doing that, the first being that the more systems to run through, the longer the runtime and delay.”
Wilde said it takes about 10 seconds for the check. He also said another reason for checking for sex offenders as opposed to entire background checks is because “there are legal restrictions on convicted sex offenders having access to school, but there are not legal restrictions having criminal convictions.”
Both Wilde and Carney said they received only positive comments from parents after letting them know they were going to start running these background checks.
“Communicating new safety measures and why we’re doing them is important,” Carney said. “We have had no concerns (from parents) about too much security or being overly cautious.”
Carney also said he thinks as schools start to secure the buildings more, school officials will look outward and work more on securing the surrounding property. At Woodland, he said the district has raised fences and tried to make the perimeter more secure.
Even with additional security steps to get in the building, Carney said it’s important for school staffers to be friendly with visitors.
“We don’t look at it like it has to be welcoming or secure,” he said. “We want our front office to be a welcoming environment, but we want our staff to feel safe and the parents of our students to feel safe.”
