October 4, 2018
By Anelga Hajjar and Rachel Zhang
For the past 14 years, Lexington High School has been the only school in the town without a badge entry system.
That is until March of last year, when Lexington voters approved a $300,000 upgrade to the security system. This enabled the installation of an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) door locks system in most of the doors around the school. The system refers to the grey boxes next to the doors that unlock when teachers activate them with their badges. The RFID locks allow a safer and more efficient door locking system throughout the school.
Throughout the day, most of the doors on the outside perimeter of the campus are locked. This is to discourage non-visitors and strangers from entering the building.
“We used to have people just walk through our building to get to the center of town. They weren’t even associated with the school. They didn’t stop by the office or have visitor badges,” Associate Principal Andrew Baker said.
Around the start of the school day, more doors are opened to allow the traffic of students to flow in. “For instance, even though it’s an outer perimeter door, the door to Commons II opens earlier in the morning because students are carrying big, heavy instruments into the band room,” Baker said. However, it is locked for the rest of the day.
At least one door on the inside perimeter of every building is unlocked throughout the day and automatic universal access doors are always open. This allows for students that are running late, going to the nurse, or entering in between classes, a way to enter the buildings.
An additional layer of security of the new system is that when the bell rings, many more doors open around the inside perimeter of the campus to reduce traffic during passing time. These will be open from the time the bell rings to five minutes after the second bell rings, indicating the start of class. Even students who are tardy still have extra time to get to class before the doors lock, and they have to find an unlocked door.
This new system means that more doors are unlocked on the inside perimeter during the day versus last year, when custodians would open over 80 exterior doors in the building. Last year doors were simply locked because the school did not have a way to put them on an electronic schedule.
“From the student experience, once the bell rings, there’s actually more doors open than there were last year. But it’s also a safer place because once you’re in class, you have a perimeter of safety around you. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than what we had before,” Baker said.
Although there was recently an upgrade of the security camera system as well, Baker explains that the school is more focused on evolving its emergency procedures and has been working with the faculty over the last year and a half.
“It’s really less about the physical space of the school and making sure that we know what to do in case of emergency in terms of human beings. One of the ways to keep you the safest is to know who people are,” Baker said.
For students, this policy was a wake-up call for the potential dangers outside of school. School safety has taken a new meaning recently after the nation witnessed many mass shootings, and the new door locking policy is just one of the reinforcements making the school a safer place.
“I think that although the policy is a step in the right direction of fixing the problem, there’s no way we can entirely ensure that LHS will be completely safe and secure. However, I do think that the door policy coupled with ALICE and other precautions are making us more prepared for a threat if one was to arise,” Emily Qiu, a junior, said.
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