BRICK TOWNSHIP – The installation of security card swipes at every district school should be completed by March 31, school officials said at a recent Board of Education meeting.
Board members voted unanimously at the Jan. 24 meeting to award a $209,447 contract to Integrated Systems and Services Inc., Cliffwood, to do the job.
A minimum of four card readers at both high schools and middle schools and at least two at each district elementary school will be installed over the next two months, district Business Administrator James Edwards said.
“Every employee will also have an identification card,” he said.
Card readers will also be installed at the district’s central administration building, bus garage and the district’s warehouse, as well as new doors at some schools, he said.
The district-wide security infrastructure improvements are a result of a referendum ballot question voters approved in April 2007.
The vote to expand and enhance each school’s safety, security and communications systems, at a cost of $275,000, was 5,674 to 3,694.
Thanks to the ballot question, the district also purchased an automatic dialer system, which allows school officials to send a recorded message to each parent in the district in the time it takes to make one phone call. The cost of the automatic dialer system is $30,000, school officials said.
Additionally, a closed-circuit feed from the district’s two high schools and middle schools to police headquarters also recently went “live,” said Leonard Niebo, the district’s director of information technology.
“We expanded on the video already existing in the schools and the feed comes through software and servers,” said Capt. John E. Rein Jr.
The two school resource officers at Brick Township High School (BTHS) and Brick Township Memorial High School (BMHS) will be able to view what is going on in the schools when they’re at their offices at police headquarters.
Niebo said that 56 cameras at BTHS and 54 cameras at BMHS, along with 40- 45 cameras at both middle schools are now hooked up to the feed.
Rein said the benefit is that the school can keep an eye on students and the police can review videotapes to investigate incidents that occur on school grounds.
“On our side, if there is big incident that requires a police response, the dispatcher can direct officers to the exact location inside the school by what they’re seeing on their computer screen,” Rein said.
The enhanced security also gives police the ability to determine who is at fault in a criminal incident, Rein said.
Rein said eventually that the feed will also be relayed into the computers that patrolmen have in their cruisers, so that they are aware of what’s going on in the school when they respond to an incident.
The upgrade of the security camera system and the software for the live feed was paid for with a $400,000 grant from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services of the U.S. Department of Justice.