The Reporter Online / North Penn, PA - 7/21/2009
By: Dan Sokil
If you want to get into any of the North Penn School District’s secondary schools, you’ll have to get past the Raptor.
Don’t worry. It’s not a frightening dinosaur or bird of prey that must be defeated for entry.
Rather, it’s an Internet-based school security system designed to protect North Penn’s students and schools from intruders.
“The company is actually called Raptorware, and was founded in Texas in 2003 to do a Web-based monitoring system, and they have people who monitor these schools 24-7 through the V-Soft system,” said Ray Wilson, North Penn’s Safe Schools coordinator.
As demonstrated at Penndale Middle School, V-Soft is a Web-based program that has been installed at the front entrance desks of five NPSD schools so far: Penndale, Pennbrook and Pennfield middle schools, Northbridge Alternative School and North Penn High School.
Each desk attendant logs into V-Soft and can control the school’s security page, where guests to a school with Raptor installed are registered and processed before entering.
“It’s very user-friendly and easy to operate. We started putting it into the secondary schools towards the end of this past school year, and so far a lot of the ladies who work the desks for the district have said they really like it,” said Wilson.
To get into the school, visitors used to simply sign their names, destinations and time of arrival in a notebook and get a generic “guest” sticker from the desk attendant.
Raptor instead requires that the guest give the desk attendant a driver’s license or other photo ID, which a small scanner about the size of a desk stapler then examines and processes, bringing up the guest’s name, date of birth, photo and occasionally other information on the V-Soft screen.
“Right here, if the ID matches the visitor and there are no problems, you put in the destination, print their ID sticker and they’re on their way,” said Wilson.
As he spoke, a similarly small printer produced an ID with the guest’s driver’s license photo and name, (in this case, photographer Geoff Patton), the date and time, and his destination — the nurse’s office.
“However, if there’s a problem, like the photo doesn’t match, or there’s an outstanding warrant on this person, or they’re a sex offender of some sort, it checks against their database, which includes 48 states and notifies you immediately, and depending on the settings can also notify the principal, assistant principal, local police or me,” he said.
Sure enough, when the information of the system’s sample offender John Doe was plugged in, a mugshot of a sample sex offender John Doe came up on the V-Soft screen, and moments later was e-mailed to Wilson’s BlackBerry.
“You do get some false hits, but the system asks you if this is a match with the person standing here or not. If not, then they’re OK, and if they are, you ask them to sit here at the desk for a minute or two and then the principal and security come out and handle it,” Wilson said.
The same system has been in use at North Montco Technical Career Center for about a year, he added, but North Penn plans to put the technology to use in the district’s 13 elementary schools as renovations take place and funding permits.
A.M. Kulp and North Wales schools are slated to get Raptor this year.
Statistics are kept for the number of guests in the building at any one time and their destinations, and statistics can be viewed from any V-Soft computer on how many guests have signed into each school or the entire district over the previous day, month and year.
When the guest leaves the school, the desk attendant simply pulls up the list of guests currently there and checks them out with a couple of clicks.
Essentially, that means instead of going to each school and paging through their binders to find someone who signed in, all of that information is already at Wilson’s fingertips in the district’s Support Services Center, and available to administrators at each school who have their own V-Soft log-ins.
“For example, if we go to the high school’s page, right now we have it set up to send e-mails about any offenders to Mr. Hynes, the principal; two assistant principals; the head of security at the high school; and myself. They did have one false hit there a couple of weeks ago, and this way as soon as that ID gets scanned into the system, all of us know about it,” said Wilson.
Even better, he said, is the low cost: about $1,500 per school for the software, printer and ID scanner. Grant applications are already in the works to try to fund a Raptor system in each of the district’s elementary schools.
“There may be some bottlenecks as people get used to the system, or if you have a lot of people come in all at once for an assembly, but so far everybody really likes the system,” Wilson said.
“In fact, we had a kid visiting the high school the other day who was lost, and a teacher saw his destination on the sticker and pointed him in the right direction; that’s another benefit we didn’t even think about,” he said.
For more information: www.RaptorWare.com.