Wake County schools will soon have software at every school that will screen each visitor for things like sex offender registry status or custody orders.
The Wake County Board of Education approved a three-year contract with West-Virginia-based Biztec for the project, costing $532,000. It would fund the system’s hardware and software licenses at each of the district’s about 200 schools.
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The visitor management system will be in place by the next school year.
The district decided on the system at the recommendation of the School Safety Advisory Council, a group of former law enforcement officers and security experts with whom the school board contracted in 2019 to conduct a security audit of the district’s nearly 200 schools.
The system will be the latest of a handful of measures the school system has taken toward security, including the audit and the formation of various policies, including a visitor policy.
But more costly projects remain.
The school district is scoping and planning for five physical security projects that it will pursue contracts and funding for as soon as this fall. The five projects also come from recommendations made by the School Safety Advisory Council. But what the projects are is confidential so far, because school system officials say they don’t want to expose potential physical vulnerability of some of the schools, which the projects would fix.