BISD board approves Raptor visitor, emergency management system purchase

The Breckenridge ISD school board approved the use of local funding through a budget amendment for the purchase of the Raptor Visitor Management System and Emergency Management Software. The program will help in emergency situations within the district as well as with vetting visitors who are sex offenders, have custody matters or are in a custom banned list created by the district.

BISD Superintendent Bryan Allen said the system will integrate with the student information system and allow for easier management of visitors. He said he was familiar with the company from his previous district.

“Raptor Technologies is a company that I’m familiar with from my previous district and since we’ve got here, we’ve been looking into whether we need this or not. I think probably maybe just one situation arose last year where this might have helped us, but you never know when that situation is going to arise,” Allen said.

The approval for the first year of having both systems, with training and setup is slightly over $18,000, according to Allen. He said part of the upfront cost includes each campus receiving a printer for badges and other equipment.

“This wasn’t in our budget in August when we passed that(...) We thought we were going to be able to use some federal money. Title 4 has a safety and security piece in it, but because some of this is really mandated by the state, if it is a state-mandated program you can’t use federal funds to pay for it so that is kind of the roadblock we have run into,” Allen said. “So I know we can’t use the federal money for the visitor management. The verdict is still out on the emergency management piece, but what we would like to do is go ahead and make a budget amendment for the whole amount and if we are able to move some of that over to a federal account then we would do that at a later time.”

The recurring cost every year after the first year will be around $9,000, which Allen said is comparable to the program used currently called COPsync. Allen said COPsync is not available to all the employees within the district, but the Raptor system will have that accessibility.

“In my mind, as soon as the COPsync agreement is up, which I think comes up in February, we don’t renew that one and this kind of takes its place,” he said.

The Raptor Visitor Management System screens for sex offenders, custody matters and banned visitors based on custom profiles set up by the district. An emergency panic button and silent alarm is also available on every screen of the service.

“Like the name says, it keeps track of the visitors who are on your campus, who they are. You will see that when they come in they are going to slide their driver’s license in a scanner, it is going to immediately check it against the sex offender list and then any other custom list that we build to give us (...) kind of an alert as to whether or not that person needs to even be on campus or seeing that student that they are asking to see,” Allen said.

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