Is Your School Protected from Sex Offenders?

Recently I accompanied a friend when she was picking her daughter up from school. Working with visitor management since 2002, I was very excited to see what the school was doing for visitor management. I knew that with a little investment, the school could know who was coming, who was allowed to pick up students, and screen against unwanted visitors, including known sex offenders.

We arrived at the school and walked through a few hallways to get to the office. We entered our names on a piece of paper and took a sticker from the roll next to the paper. No one greeted us or checked our ID’s. We could have been anybody and we now had full access to the school.

The school could have joined hundreds of other schools in the US and used PassagePoint EDU. These schools use PassagePoint to register visitors, as well as to screen them against internal watch lists and sex offender registries for all 50 states and US territories and Reservations. Visitors simply scan their government issued ID, for example their driver’s license, at a kiosk or present it to the system operator, and select who they are visiting. After they pass the watch list and offender screenings, they are issued a customized visitor badge to wear during their visit.

The Sex Offender screening service is a great fit for schools. It requires an internet connection and includes the following:

  • Pre-screening applicants, temporary personnel and faculty against Sex Offender Registry for added security.
  • During visitor sign-in instantly screens all visitors with a manual search by the push of a button or by setting PassagePoint to automatically trigger a search for every visitor sign-in against the Sex Offender Registry before letting them into the facility.
  • Automatic e-mail notification sent to administration/security when positive match is found during the Sex Offender Registry screen.
  • Visitors who are flagged and cleared as “False positives” (same name – different person) are added to a whitelist so they are not flagged on subsequent return visits.