This article originally appeared in the Shelbyville Times-Gazette, and was written by Jason Reynolds. To view the original article, click here.
SHELBYVILLE – School visitors soon will have to show their ID — and carry their pictures around on their shirts.
Bedford County schools will start conducting sex-offender background checks in February, Superintendent Don Embry told the Board of Education on Tuesday.
The schools are subscribing to a service, called Raptor Technologies, that will conduct instant nationwide checks of sex offender registries. Several Middle Tennessee school systems use the service.
New badges
Visitors currently must sign in at school offices and wear a sticky name tag, but they do not have to show an ID. That will change, Embry said. Any government-issued ID will work, although a driver’s license will be the most common identification used, he said.
Substitute teachers will be required to submit to the checks as well, the superintendent said. Currently they do not carry around any employee identification at school, he said.
If the person passes the check, the school office will print off a sticky badge with the person’s name and driver’s license photo (if a license is the ID that is used), Embry said.
Text alerts
If the person fails the check, a text message alert will be sent to at least one official — the principal, the assistant principal or the school resource officer — or all three, depending on how the school has set up their preferences, Embry said. The alert will be set up that way so the school secretary will not be required to confront the visitor.
The system should be set up in each school by the first week of February, Embry said, but administrators will take some time to “tweak” the technology and to train staff. Letters will be sent to parents and guardians informing them of the change in security.
The system’s Central Office will use the service to conduct sex-offender checks on new hires.
“It’s a great system,” Embry said. “All the schools are getting this.”
Saved info
The system will save the information of all visitors, Embry said, to be used again in case they are frequent visitors to make the check run faster.
There is a one-time set-up fee of approximately $1,600 and then an annual fee of $300 per school, Embry said. The funds are being spent from federal Safe Schools funding the system already has. There is no fee to run individual background checks. Other felonies will not be checked because some felonies are harder to check, he said.
More information on the background check service is available at raptortech.com.
