CRESTVIEW — Gone are the days of signing a log, slapping a sticker on one’s chest and strolling off to a classroom or event at local schools.
A new check-in system not only replaces the old log books, it can tell if the visitor should be at the school at all.
“Basically, parents and volunteers will go and instead of necessarily checking in at the front desk, there will be a kiosk,” Okaloosa County School District Community Affairs Director Henry Kelley said.
The new system, called School Checkin, has been tested at several Okaloosa County schools, including Walker Elementary, during the last school year.
Visitors scan their driver license barcodes. That downloads a photo of the holder and prints it on a visitor sticker the guest wears while on campus.
SHARED DATA
The information won’t just be housed at the first school at which the visitor checks in. Often, Kelley said, parents, volunteers, vendors and guests have reason to call at several schools.
The district-wide system will share a central data base so the stored information is retrievable at any Okaloosa County school.
“Across the district we’ll have a consistent platform,” Kelley said. “We’ll be able to track visitors across the district. The intent is, once you enter the district at some point, that data gets spread. Some parents have kids at multiple schools.”
District IT techs “did their magic” last week, Kelley said, to have the new equipment installed, tested and operational by the Aug. 10 start of school.
Kelley said it will take a few weeks until the data can be shared by all schools in the district.
“It’s a crawl-walk-run. We want to get it set up for the start of the school year,” he said. “Once it’s up and running, it will go across the system.”
TWO GOALS
School Checkin will meet two major needs, Kelley said.
“It’s ultimately about school safety,” he said. “If a principal says, ‘I need to know how many parents are on campus right now,’ boom, there it is.”
“It’s worked well for us,” Walker Elementary clerk Jennifer Johnson said. “When you scan your ID to check in as a visitor, it runs a check through all the major data bases such as sexual offenders.
“Occasionally, if your name is identical to someone that’s on a predator list, it will flag you and we have to come out and verify who you are and then put you on the good-guy list.”
If a visitor’s name is on a predator list, the system will also send an alert text to the school resource officer.
And because visitors have to check in and check out—something some forget to do under the log book process—it will also facilitate logging volunteers’ hours.
“We have to report volunteer hours to the state,” Kelley said. “It makes that data tracking easier. Once you’re cleared in the system you’re good to go.”
This article originally appeared on Crestview News Bulletin: New Okaloosa schools check-in system implemented