OTHELLO — The Othello School District installed new Secure Access Keypads at all its school buildings Feb. 5. Moving forward, all visitors are required to check in through the keypad, which allows school staff to see and speak with the visitor before letting them enter.

OSD Superintendent Pete Perez said the new system is meant to control and monitor access to the schools.

“For a number of years, we have pushed for locked doors in our buildings. That's what’s in the research and what we've been trained about,” he said. “Locked doors matter most.”

The keypads were planned out in the district’s budget and part of the school’s efforts over several years toward security and safety updates, Perez said. 

“We had to add or upgrade some phones in our main offices that had a video screen that allows those staff to interact with a person who presents their photo ID and presses a call for service at the front entry,” he said. “Then, remotely through the phone, once they've identified visually who that individual is, they can push a button and let them enter the facility.”

The new system is more than just the keypad.

“When they enter, we also have added a system that allows us to do a very quick Washington state background check,” Perez said. “So, if it's someone new to our campus, someone we haven't met before, someone who's going to volunteer and be around kids, it allows us to have that brief check as well. The photo ID is then produced from that technology, we give them a temporary sticker, and they can visit our campus. It's another layer to making sure we feel comfortable with anybody that's going to be in our schools day to day.”

Perez explained the original motivation behind implementing the system.

“For the last several years in schools across the country, and in our state, there's a heightened awareness of safety protocols,” he said. “So we are continually looking for ways to improve and enhance safety in our schools. We really believe in a layered approach in Othello, which certainly starts with kids feeling comfortable and connected at school, feeling like they belong there.”

The district and the school board worked together to analyze the need for the new system, Perez said.

“It's really focused on some conversations with the school board and the community, their experiences in other schools in the Columbia Basin and other schools they visited across the state where you have a controlled, locked front entry,” he said. “So we spent some time investigating the cost of that and what it might do to student flow. We got the hardware in place. We spent a couple of weeks training our staff … We are going to continue to monitor how it feels when people arrive at our schools. We want them to feel welcome, but it's so important that everybody else also feels safe.”

Perez talked about what would happen if a school employee was not comfortable letting someone into the building. 

“If (staff) didn't feel comfortable, we have our administrators, we have a security personnel in our secondary schools, we have (Student Resource Officers) in our secondary schools as well,” he said. “They can approach and interact with that individual. So it doesn't limit access to anyone but it allows us to control access.”

Perez talked about the system’s impact on the school’s budget.

“It’s certainly a cost-effective system,” he said. “We have had integrated cameras and phones across our district for a number of years, so it's really just merging that technology and the camera and the phone at the front entry with what we already have in place. So it wasn't a big infrastructure expense.”

Perez said that the district hopes office staff know students well, but they also have access to photo IDs of all the students in the district if the staff does not recognize a student.

“Right now we're wrestling with, what does it do to the flow and feel of schools, and what's the trade-off from a safety perspective?” Perez said. “So we're going to give it a go here for a month or so and then we'll provide feedback to the community and to the board based on how our administrators and our staff feel about how it felt.”

Perez elaborated on how the system operated in its first week and the feedback so far.

“There are absolutely some things we need to think about and consider from a manpower perspective and how it has impacted flow in the main offices, and we're going to work through those (things),” Perez said. “Most of the comments that I have received from the community and particularly from parents who arrive at school, they appreciate the sense of comfort that they felt in knowing that the district takes safety seriously.”

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com. A resident of Othello, Davis covers south Grant County communities and Adams County.

    The Othello School District’s new Secure Access Keypads, pictured, were installed in every school building in the district Feb. 5, allowing office staff to see and interact with visitors before allowing them entry into the school.
  

    The main entrance to Othello High School, pictured, is one of several campus entrances that is now more secure due to new security measures.