Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Schools

Visiting campus? Prepare for check

An elementary school is using a system to run guests' drivers' licenses through a sexual offender database.

By STEPHEN HEGARTY
Published April 9, 2005

[Times photo: Dan McDuffie]

Lake Myrtle Elementary School secretary Louise Ford holds visitor Laurie Tifton's driver's license and school pass after scanning the license to make the ID and check Tifton's records for a sexual predator history.

LAND O'LAKES - Laurie Tifton strolled into the office at Lake Myrtle Elementary School ready to sign the visitor log so she could have lunch with her daughters.

But a signature isn't enough these days. She was asked to hand over her driver's license.

The license was inserted into an optical scanner at the front desk. A visitor's pass popped out of a tiny printer a few seconds later. The pass had Tifton's name, the time and date and a photographic image taken off her license.

In those same few seconds, Tifton's name and date of birth were run through a database of sex offenders in 46 states.

Nothing matched, so Mrs. Tifton headed toward the cafeteria to surprise her daughters with lunch from a nearby Sonic restaurant.

Lake Myrtle Elementary is the first school in the Tampa Bay area to embrace the newest wrinkle in the business of trying to make campuses safe. It's called V.Soft, which stands for Visitor Student or Faculty Tracking.

It creates a combination visitor pass and photo ID that links to the sex offender database.

"That's a great idea," said Mrs. Tifton, who had to hike back to her truck to retrieve her license so she could check in. "If it stops someone who shouldn't be here, I don't mind at all."

The technology comes from a Houston company called Raptor Technologies, which has signed up hundreds of schools in Texas and is now expanding into other states, including Florida. So far, a dozen or so schools in Miami-Dade, Alachua, Highlands and Bay counties have spent the $1,500 to set up and run the V.Soft technology for the first year. Costs are lower in subsequent years.

"We have a lot of elementary schools looking into it," said Carol Measom, the company's marketing director. "They've got the little kids, who are more of a target."

The company clearly sees a business opportunity. Educators want to know who's on campus, and parents fret about sex offenders near their children. Parents in Citrus County were shocked last month to learn that the man suspected of murdering 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford spent time working as a mason's helper at the girl's school, Homosassa Elementary School.

Measom said Raptor has offered to install its technology at Homosassa Elementary, but has not heard back from the school district.

There is no law prohibiting laborers with criminal histories from working on school campuses. But at many schools, including Lake Myrtle, principals try to make sure visitors, volunteers and workers check in at the office as they come on campus.

The technology might force Pasco and other local school districts to devise new policies or guidelines. Pasco school officials who recently visited Lake Myrtle to see the scanner had plenty of questions. Most of them involved the question of what to do when there is a match.

Lake Myrtle, which has had the technology for about a month, has not yet had a match.

"What do you do when you have a sex offender who is living with a mother or who has a child in the schools?" said Richard Tauber, supervisor of volunteer programs for Pasco schools. "What do you do in that case? You could argue that they have a right to visit a school.

"I think it sounds like a great tool," Tauber said. "But it raises a lot of interesting questions."

Lake Myrtle principal John Abernathy said his plan is to notify a school resource officer if and when the school gets a match on a sex offender. The school shares an officer with two other area schools.

Brian Moyer, the school district's safety officer who oversees the school officers, said it would be up to an officer to speak to the suspected sex offender and do the necessary research.

Not all sex offenders, Moyer noted, are prohibited by law from being around children. And many databases fail to differentiate between predators, repeat offenders and, for instance, a 19-year-old who had consensual sex with his 17-year-old girlfriend.

"We would need to get some more information, see what their status is," Moyer said. "This is becoming such an issue, we'll be doing a lot more training with our principals."

The Sarasota County School District, where four schools recently tested the scan technology, has had at least one match. District spokeswoman Sheila Weiss said it was a worker involved in a construction project on campus. In that case the school resource officer took the worker aside and spoke with him. The man agreed to leave the campus.

"It was handled very quietly. He hasn't been back to the campus," Weiss said.

It's important to know what the scanner does not do. It does not do a full criminal background check. It won't call up a 20-year-old burglary or drug conviction. What it does is check a series of databases of sex offenders. It searches using the visitor's first and last name, date of birth, address and picture.

"It's unlikely, but there could be a mistaken match based on the name and date of birth," Measom said. "Which is exactly why we bring up that photograph."

Abernathy had little trouble interesting parents in the technology. The parents on his School Advisory Council, a group that receives state money for school improvements, agreed to pay for the scanner.

"If you look at what it does, I don't think it's that expensive," said John Verscharen, a member of the Lake Myrtle School Advisory Council. "I have two kids at the school. Pretty soon I'll have three. To me as a parent, it was a no brainer."

[Last modified April 9, 2005, 07:10:29]