News and Information

Raptor Scanners- A New Twist on School Safety
Melissa Correa, CBS 7 News, Midland, Texas

September 4, 2007 – Midland- "The Raptor" is a new piece of technology for MISD. It's designed to track visitors and weed out sex offenders.

"Junior high is a bigger place this year. There's twice as many people there."

Greta Newson worries about her 7th grade son. Once she drops him off, she has no idea what visitors are on campus and why they're there.

"I worry who has access to the school."

Now, Newson won't have to worry...thanks to a small scanner.

"The sole purpose is to track who's on campus," says Allan Measom, President of Raptor Technologies.

The Raptor system is named is V-SPOT, for "Visitor, Student or Faculty Tracking". It's a piece of technology that crosses every visitors I-D card with

"49 state sex offender databases. Over 450,000 sex offenders that we update about three times a month," says Measom. "It probably takes 2-3 seconds."

Seconds...before police and administrators are notified that a sex offender is on campus.

Last year, this system logged more than 1,000 sex offenders trying to get into one of the more than 3,000 schools that use the software.

"A lot of them have been arrested," says Measom. "Quite a few vendors filling the coke machines, working there as construction. "

And as a parent, Newson couldn't ask for any better safety measure.

"As more people move in to Midland, maybe they'll feel safer and put their kids in public schools," says Newson.