Below is the audio of an interview with the Chief of District Security for the Val Verde Unified School District Chris Wynn. The entire transcribed interview is also available below and in the proceeding pages.

1) What is your background? How did you get into security systems?
I actually come from a long background in public safety, primarily in law enforcement. I was a firefighter paramedic for about six years, and then I did a 19-year career in law enforcement and was promoted up through the ranks of law enforcement. When I retired from law enforcement, I came to work for the Val Verde Unified School district as their Chief of Security. As far as my job here as the Chief of Security, not only do I oversee the department of security, which is security officers, I play a big role in researching and helping implement various types of security plans and protocols and technologies that are out and available.

2) What kinds of security systems are available for schools?
There are a lot of different things, starting from your most basic alarm systems that are out there. Just the act of having a system in place that secures the site when nobody’s there, I think that’s one that’s often overlooked, but is important. I think what we focus on most of the time is how we are protecting schools while students are here.

One of the most basic features is camera systems. There’s been a significant improvement in the ability to utilize camera systems, the quality of camera systems that are out there, as well as the ease of watching. It used to be camera systems would all dump into a single recorder and you had to have someone in front of it watching it. Now, we have cameras that record to servers, you can go back in time and look at them. With the system we have in place, I can actually monitor from my desktop, I can monitor from my iPad, I can monitor from my iPhone. I have the ability to look at my campuses, all 21 of my sites, at any given time by literally pulling my phone out of my pocket.

[One] system that we’re utilizing is a lobby management system where we’re registering and controlling access to our sites by requiring visitors who are going to enter into our secure portion of our sites to present a valid identification. It is scanned into a system that runs against the sex registrant database as well as an internal database that we create, meaning if we have court orders that are in place or they’ve been banned from our site for one reason or another. It will check their ID against that type of stuff to make sure that the only people coming into school are people we want to allow into our school.

The system also prints a universal identification badge. Previously, every site was responsible for making their own ID badges, and we had everything from stickers to plastic badges on yarn necklaces. Now, we have a single, universal ID badge that is recognized across the entire district as a person who is a visitor that is approved to be on campus. Those are kind of some of the bigger systems that are in use.

3) What are some steps a school should take when deciding on which security system to go with?
I think the Raptor system, which is our lobby management system, is probably the most recent one that we’ve taken from concept to full implementation. I think the first thing you have to do is figure out what you’re trying to accomplish. It can be relatively fool-hardy to sit down at a single vendor presentation and say oh, this is what we want, without really thinking about it or involving your staff, involving the cabinet level positions and finding out what you want this particular system to do.

Once you have an idea of what you want it to do, then I suggest finding out if schools in the area have something similar that you can do and look at. We actually went out and looked at a couple of different systems in the local area just to see if there was something we missed, are there other things that are possible, or