Raising Importance of Visitor Management Solutions
Children unquestionably are the most vulnerable elements and soft targets of violent acts because of their young age, lack of awareness of surroundings and limited physical ability to respond to security and safety threats. Further, given the fact that children usually spend majority of their time at educational institutes, schools across the world have witnessed multiple dreadful incidents in the recent years which include ghastly terror attacks, gun violence, sexual offences, assaults, kidnapping, exploitation and abuse amongst others.
Data made available in the public domain by Bureau’s National Crime Information Center, USA indicated that in 2017, USA reported approximately 32,000 cases of missing children. Majority of the cases belong to children missing from the school premises or parking areas. As a result, every school today strives to provide a safe, secure and risk-free environment for its students to learn and staff to work. Schools Safety has become one of the foremost goals of school, parents and law enforcement agencies across the country.
School Safety’ has been defined as the creation of a safe and secure environment for children starting from their homes to their schools and back. Although there is no universal security and safety plan that can be implemented for every school, the typical the school security and safety control framework include various measures to prevent respond to, and recover from range of security and safety threats mentioned above.
Not all threats can be prevented, but actions can surely be taken to inimize the occurrence of threats, and to reduce their adverse impact by identification of the threats in minimum time. Such preventive measures typically focus on restricting access to unauthorized individuals on school premises, resulting in effective Visitor Management Systems as one of the key elements of school security and safety framework across the world.
Visitor management System is an emerging technological solution that is implemented at the school premises with the aim to keep track of every individual entering and exiting the school premises. VMS helps in securing the school premises, identifying unauthorized entrants/intruders and providing emergency notifications to relevant stakeholders of the school in order to provide a timely response to any untoward security incident.
Best Practices
A good visitor management system should equip the school to cater to stringent security measures for School-K-12 and other educational institutes. It should be scalable and flexible to cater to individual local schools as well as at the school district levels.
Visitor Check-in: The visitors should be able to ask for an early pick up of their wards or meeting teachers/ students via QR Code and their cell numbers.
Visitor badges should capture photos of each visitor, and necessary details such as phone no, ID card number to track visitors in case of any emergency. Color tags help identify types of visitors such as parents, guardians, friends and distant family.
Check-ins should be One Time Passcode (OTP) based authentication, ensuring visitors leave some trackable information before their entry into the premises.
Digitally scanning of ID cards, specially driving licence ensure smooth visitor registration.
Background verification. The VMS should check from the National Sex Offenders Registry list.
Child pick should be allowed only to authorized custodians who are validated in advance or, any other meeting ad-hoc visits can be managed effectively.
The VMS should be operational on tablet or kiosk and should seamlessly integrate with various access control solutions.
The application should also integrate with the school management systems to ensure entries are valid, wherever school management systems are available. The VMS should address compliances as laid by PASS (Partner Alliance for Safer Schools) guidelines for Safer Schools.
The VMS should have an inbuilt mass notification system, allowing school administration to communicate during an emergency.
The VMS should provide analytical reports that would help the school management track visitor’s footfall. These would also allow schools to derive intelligent reports to analyze trends.
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