Posted on 10/18/2006 7:53:48 PM PDT by Iam1ru1-2
Houston, TX (AHN) - In an era when deadly school shootings seem to happen at an alarming rate, some schools like Spring Independent School District in suburban Houston, have decided to take security measure into their own hands.
Every morning, some 16,000 students swipe their ID tags as they climb onto the school bus, while a radio frequency tag tracks them, as it does when they arrive at school and as they leave the building.
Furthermore, nearly 1,000 cameras watch them all day. Every visitor-from parents, volunteers, to the guy who fills the Coke machine - must surrender his or her driver's license to a secretary who checks it against a national database of sex offenders.
Alan Bragg, chief of Spring's school police, tells USA Today, "If somebody's really determined to get into a school and they have a high enough caliber weapon, they're going to get in," But, he adds, ID checks and the like are "a huge deterrent" to most would-be criminals.
And though shootings like those at Columbine High School in 1999 prompted schools to be on the lookout for violent students, safety experts say kidnapping and molestation cases also have forced them to pay attention to adults on campus.
Florida and California now require criminal background checks for anyone working or regularly visiting a school.
Meanwhile, schools in 19 states use visitor tracking systems to stop registered sex offenders at the front desk. Since the school year began, the technology has ID'd more than 100 offenders, about seven a day. According to the report, they're now in 2,020 schools in 212 districts. After an initial investment of $1,500, schools pay $432 a year to access the system.
"In an era when deadly school shootings seem to happen at an alarming rate,"
The operative term here is "seem to". They happen much less in school than out of school, but as usual, facts will not mean much.
The whole idea that we can eliminate even the tiniest risks, no matter what the costs, is idiotic!
And this will stop a sociopath bent on a suicide mission just how?
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