By MATT FRAZIER / STAR TELEGRAM - 1/12/2009

More and more area school districts are checking the identities of campus visitors against national sex-offender databases. Birdville and Keller are the latest to use identification scanners capable of searching for names and addresses of registered sex offenders.

Even if the system doesn’t find sex offenders, the scanners and the visitor badges that it prints make it easier to know who is on campus and who doesn’t belong there, district officials say.

"It just adds for us another level of safety and protection," Birdville spokesman Mark Thomas said.

Other area districts using such systems include Carroll, Crowley, Eagle Mountain-Saginaw, Mansfield and Northwest. Birdville introduced the system in September in a pilot program at two campuses, the Academy at West Birdville and Smithfield Middle School.

The system received five hits; in three cases, the visitor had the same name and birth date as someone on a sex-offender database. The two others were parents whose parole did not preclude campus visits. In those cases, a chaperone was provided.

The system "is very efficient, very reliable," said Lindi Andrews, principal of the Academy.

Birdville paid about $46,000 for the system and will spend about $13,000 a year for maintenance.

It is in use at all campuses except for Richland and Haltom high schools, which are undergoing reconstruction. It will be introduced at those schools and at the district’s career center when construction is completed this year, Thomas said.

Keller launched a pilot program at four elementary campuses in April 2007; voters approved expanding the program to most other schools using funds from a November bond referendum.

The system is in use at North Riverside, Eagle Ridge, Keller-Harvel and Liberty elementary schools; officials are still deciding whether to use it at the district’s high schools.

The expansion is scheduled to be complete by this fall, said Jeff Baker, Keller’s director of planning and security.

Keller’s system has received several hits, but most were "false positives." Two hits were sex offenders; both were parents of students who had come to watch their own children at a school activity, Baker said.

At Carroll, the system had one hit, a contractor. He was removed from campus, said Julie Thannum, Carroll spokeswoman.

Birdville, Carroll, Keller and Northwest are using the Raptor system, which was co-developed by Houston native Allan Measom to track people who were visiting Enron.

After that company’s bankruptcy, he and his business partner, Justin Waldrip, worked for more than a year to develop a system to better identify people going into public schools.

Raptor began installing its first systems in February 2003.

How it works

Although area districts use different systems and have different policies, there are similarities. Generally, every visitor during school hours who is not a district employee, uniformed police officer or a child protection worker must state his or her destination and present a driver’s license to be scanned by the system before being allowed to move beyond the main office.

The system compares the visitor’s name and birth date with those on national sex offender databases. If there is a match, the system sends an e-mail with a photograph of the registered sex offender.

The photo is used to determine whether the visitor is the person listed in the database or merely has the same name and birthday. Some systems print a badge with a visitor’s name and picture — and possibly the date, time and destination — making it easy for teachers and staff to see that visitors have been screened.

They can also keep a time-stamped log of when visitors enter and leave.

In the past, most districts used a sign-in sheet and small visitor stickers that were easier to steal and gave no information about a visitor.

"That allows us to see who is in our buildings at all times," said Kristen Escovedo, spokeswoman for the Eagle Mountain-Saginaw school district, which started using an ID system in 2005.

"So while the sex-offender identification is an important part of this system, it also offers additional security measures that we find very valuable in keeping our campuses safe places to educate our students."

If a sex offender is a parent of a child at the school and is not prohibited by parole requirements from visiting the campus, the offender is given a chaperone.

The system does not check for traffic tickets, warrants, felonies, immigration status or past convictions other than for sexual offenses.