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Keep Away
Government Technology Magazine: Texas Technology
By Andy Opsahl and Merrill Douglas

Jan 19, 2006 – Has your child ever met a sex offender at school? Many parents in Texas are getting a surprising answer to that question.

More than 200 registered sex offenders have recently visited Texas schools, and to curb those visits, more than 800 schools have implemented sex offender tracking technology, checking every school visitor against a 44-state database of registered sex offenders.

Vetting Visitors

Eagle Mountain-Saginaw Independent School District (ISD), serving more than 10,400 students in the Fort Worth area, rolled out a visitor identification application -- called Vsoft -- in October 2005. Vsoft identifies visitors to each school, checking them against a sex offender database of registries from nearly all 50 states.

Vsoft allows office staff to print, for every visitor, a badge that displays his driver's license or other state ID photo, the visitor's reason for being at the school, the time he checked in and his campus destination.

"If my badge says I'm supposed to be in the cafeteria and I'm in the library, they're going to ask, 'Excuse me, are you lost? Are you looking for the cafeteria? It's down the hall,'" said Kristen Escovedo, director of communications for Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD.

If a parent is identified as a registered sex offender, a designated Vsoft user -- usually front office personnel -- will require that parent to wait for her child in the office or escort her to wherever her child is. Parents who are sex offenders are permitted to volunteer at school functions, according to Escovedo, provided they have no opportunity for alone time with the other children.

Escovedo said 11 of the 12 Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD campuses only have one entrance open during the day, and every visitor must pass the front office to enter the campus.

If a stranger were to sneak past the front office, that person would, in theory, stand out to faculty members because of the lack of an ID badge. Most schools using Vsoft only install it at their front offices, but some schools station employees at several entrances with laptop computers, said Carol Measom, marketing director of Raptor Technologies, the company that designed the software.

Vsoft, which operates the 44-state sex offender database, is now used in more than 800 schools in Texas and 1,200 nationwide, Measom said.

"The reason we're not screening the other six [states] is they're not providing enough information on the offender to effectively narrow it down," Measom said, noting that the remaining states were missing either the offender's birthday or photo, both of which Vsoft needs to avoid false matches.

"You're going to have someone with the same name as a sex offender somewhere else in the country because some sex offenders are named 'John Smith,'" Measom said. "Sometimes even then, people will have the same name and birthday as a sex offender, which is kind of creepy for them, I'm sure."

Brave New Security World

Raptor originally developed Vsoft to merely computerize the visitor log-in process in schools, the security for which has moved in a more technological direction since 9/11.

"People started realizing that signing a logbook doesn't do anything if your building's not there anymore," Measom said, meaning that should a bombing or other terrorist act destroy the building in which the logbook was located, it would be impossible to know who was responsible. "You don't know who was in [the school]."

Each campus system is hosted on the company's servers, accessible from any online computer in case of a disaster.

The company examined the results from Texas schools over the course of two years to get an idea of how many registered sex offenders visited schools where the software was installed.

"What we found absolutely stunned us," said Allan Measom, president and CEO of Raptor Technologies. "Seventy-three percent of all registered sex offenders logged at our Texas school installations had previous convictions of sexual crimes against children -- with the victim's average age being 11. The most disturbing part of this is that most of these registered sex offenders are parents or guardians with children at that school. And even worse than that, many of them visit the school on a regular basis."

The company found that more than 200 individual sex offenders visited Texas schools from February 2003 to February 2005. Even that number doesn't represent the total number of visits, since most visitors were parents who came multiple times, according to Carol Measom.

Escovedo said Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD's implementation of the technology was not due to any previous trouble involving sex offenders. District officials discovered the technology at a conference last year and persuaded their administrator to buy it. They solicited different providers and decided Vsoft was the easiest to use and offered the best price.

The company charges districts a one-time fee of $1,000 per campus for hardware, and a $432 subscription fee per campus each year.

On the Lookout

While Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD has had no trouble with sex offenders, and only a few have visited since implementation in October 2005, Escovedo said the district remains vigilant due to a rapidly increasing population.

"We're growing at about 15 percent a year, so we have people constantly moving into the district," Escovedo said. "It's an issue that's on everybody's mind. Our area encompasses three different city limits."

Realtors use Vsoft as a selling point when showing houses in the district, according to Escovedo, who said she received only one complaint about the technology.

"It's kind of funny," Escovedo said. "The picture that gets printed out on your badge is your driver's license picture, and what picture do people hate more than any other -- their driver's license picture. That's the complaint we get. It doesn't have anything to do with privacy or the system -- they love the system."

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) regularly trains school administrators to be vigilant and careful about sex offenders and other child predators.

"Sex offenders are mobile, they're transient, they look for access and opportunity, and they go where kids are," said Nancy McBride, national safety director of the NCMEC. "A school campus is one of those places, just like a mall would be or movie theaters, or any place where kids are congregating."

McBride said open-air campuses with multiple entrances are particularly at risk, and that sex offenders also target children on their way to and from school.

"I know in different communities where there is an attempt or an incident, everybody mobilizes, they walk the kids to and from school, and they monitor the bus stops. They do that for maybe a month, and then they stop doing it," McBride said.

Parents and schools must maintain their vigilance 365 days a year, she said, adding that children are most at risk of being molested by someone they know.

One Vsoft feature addresses that sobering fact -- schools can list noncustodial parents whose access to their children is restricted. If such a parent checks in, a private alert will pop up on the screen that explains the situation, Measom said, explaining that the alert will inform school staff using the system that Mr. John Smith may have lunch with Jimmy Smith, but may not check him out of school.

"It's not enough to just be on the lookout for somebody in a car that people don't know," McBride said. "We need to know who the other adults are in a child's life."

Andy Opsahl
Staff Writer

Merrill Douglas
Contributing Writer
Merrill Douglas is a freelance writer based in upstate New York. She specializes in applications of information technology.