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6 questions schools should ask before purchasing a Visitor Management System

by Paul Kazlauskas

School security is serious business. In light of some horrifying incidents over the past 15 years, schools across America have made the security of their students and staff a top priority. Schools need to know who is in their building and stop unwanted visitors from entering their facility. Visitor Management Systems (VMS) are the #1 tool used by administrators to record who is, or was, in the school at any point in time and provide documentation of any particular visitor’s whereabouts. Here are some questions that administrators should ask any VMS vendor before deciding on a system to purchase…

1) What is the cost to initially purchase – and what is the 3 year cost of ownership? Visitor Management Systems have obvious initial costs that include the software, equipment (such as cameras & printers), and badges that visitors will wear while on school grounds. It is important to realize that some components to a VMS have recurring fees and expenses that may not be so obvious. For example, some software licenses have annual fees after year one. Equipment such as Driver’s License Readers or access to a Predator Screening Database could come with yearly fees as well. How many visitors do you see on a daily/monthly/yearly basis? You’ll need visitor badges for all those people too.

2) Can I select specific features or do I have to buy the whole package? Many VMS vendors offer “1-stop shopping” where you can get all your software, system components, and visitor badges in one purchased “bundle”. That convenience is efficient for your time, but is it efficient from a cost perspective? If you don’t need all the features a VMS offers, you may still need to pay for them if they are considered part of a particular “bundle”. It may be better, from a financial perspective, to pick a vendor that allows you to choose only the features you plan on using while allowing the flexibility to upgrade should the need arise in the future.

3) Will the visitor management system-required equipment work with my district’s systems? This is a very important aspect to consider because it could mean the difference of thousands of dollars. If the new VMS equipment does work with your district’s existing systems, there shouldn’t be any additional costs for infrastructure upgrades. However, if the existing systems need to be upgraded to work with the new VMS equipment because it is proprietary, the school will have quite a larger school security investment to make overall than in the first scenario. Search your options to see if commodity equipment can be purchased from a third-party in an effort to keep costs down.

4) How do visitor management system background checks work and what information does it tell? Many visitor management systems can do a quick background check on visitors entering a school. This service isn’t always free and the fee-per-check should be identified before implementing it because the costs add up quickly. Will you be conducting a background check on every visitor that enters your school grounds? If not every visitor, how do you decide who gets a background check? Two more important points to consider are the kinds of information uncovered by the background check beyond “is this person a sex offender” and what will the school do if a potential visitor shows up on a banned list?

5) How much support is needed to keep the system working? Does a school staff member need to monitor the VMS for it to work efficiently for your visitors? Dedicating a staff member to its use, even if it’s only a part-time para-professional, is an important consideration because that person could be accomplishing something else with their time. In addition, how reliable is the VMS system itself? If the software goes down every so often, which school employee is going to be the point person to work with the vendor’s support team when things aren’t working properly?

6) How is the data in the visitor management system protected? Protecting the privacy of all types of visitors that come into a school is critical, especially since the majority of them won’t be sex offenders or other types of criminals. Visitor Management Systems store the visitor information either on hard drives or in the cloud. That data needs to be protected and should be encrypted with password-protected systems. The school is liable for the protection of the data they collect and the process should be taken very seriously.

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Posted on 3/2/2015