White County Schools utilizing state grant funding to install card key entry points at strategic locations throughout the district to enhance building security.
Director of Schools Kurt Dronebarger said the new system allows educators to enter school buildings by swiping a lanyard or credit card-sized device.
“Our high school is our main concern,” Dronebarger said. “It’s spread out into about four different buildings and so we have various access points there. They have the most doors. This won’t go on every door but just on key locations where we are funneling our traffic through, whether it’s teacher entrances or where the students enter and exit.”
Dronebarger said the district previously completed a rekeying process for every lock in the school system to ensure all physical keys are unique and cannot be duplicated. The upcoming security upgrades include window coverings and other small ticket items.
“We also had some places where it was convenient to have coded entry locks so you could punch in codes,” Dronebarger said. “But obviously codes get shared, they get distributed, and then you might as well not even have a lock. So this way these keys can be turned on and turned off if they get lost and we don’t have to worry about codes being floating out there in the public.”
Dronebarger said the funding won’t be enough to upgrade every entrance and exit way in the schools, only at certain places the security measures will be added.
“Locations where we are trying to funnel our traffic and make sure we’re controlling the ingress and egress,” Dronebarger said. “We just saw at the end of last school year that we had an amount left over from our previous projects, but we didn’t have enough. We held off till this year knowing that we’d have more funding coming to braid those funds together and make this project happen.”
Dronebarger said the district can utilize the full amount of the funding immediately because the project was intentionally delayed to wait for the second round of state money. The grants do not require any local matching funds from the county.
“We’re certainly glad to receive these funds,” Dronebarger said. “It’s about $79,000 that we wouldn’t have had otherwise, but it is a little disheartening to hear in this day and age that they’re cutting the funding for safety in schools. So we’ll hope that in the next budget we’ll see that rebound, there’ll be more money in that.”
Dronebarger said the district will continue to survey principals and teachers to identify future needs such as fencing or cameras.
The nearly $79,000 project funded through a carryover budget from the previous year with a smaller allocation from the current cycle.
