Student and school safety starts with visitor flow on your campus. Control and track who is in your building with a school visitor management system.
Visitor management systems streamline visitor check-ins by digitizing your institution's organization, security, and compliance efforts. Online dashboards help oversee school security and optimize the visitor sign-in process without diluting visitor experience quality.
Here are the key features and benefits of school visitor management systems for safety and efficiency.
Features of School Visitor Management Systems
Visitor management features facilitate front-of-house operations such as reception and check-out processes. Administrators can tailor features to serve niche needs in different contexts. In a school setting, these are the three most beneficial features:
Guest Sign-In and Tracking
On any given day, your school receives multiple visitors with various purposes. They may be vendors delivering supplies, maintenance personnel doing repairs, temporary tutors, or parents visiting their children. Using guest sign-in kiosks, you can identify and validate each visitor coming in and out of the school.
Visitor sign-in kiosks allow self-guided check-in technology, capturing critical visitor data.
Upon sign-in, visitor management systems can auto-print visitor badges. Badges ease security and verification. It is immediately visible whether or not someone has signed in and can display important details like visitor type or purpose.
Schools can set up custom visitor types such as parents, guest speakers, and support staff.
After-Hours Events and Evening Classes
Digital visitor kiosks make it easy for parents and students to check in to after-school programs. After hours, front desk staff may be busy or out-of-office. The self-guided kiosks enable schools to automate reception. As a result, they can continue signing visitors in with a secure, user-friendly process.
Returning visitors can receive QR codes or print badges with preset expiry dates. This allows people to attend recurring events without going through the full sign-in process every time. For instance, someone attending evening classes could pre-register online and receive a QR code on their smartphone. The school can create custom settings to allow the student to sign in by scanning their phone during certain time frames up to a specific date. This gives them access to their classes without giving them access during daytime hours or after their classes are completed.
Custom settings allow schools to keep visitor flow convenient after hours without exposing students to risk during regular operations.
Registered Sex Offender Screening
Over 780,000 sex offenders were listed in the US national database as of 2019. You need to know who is coming into your building to protect students. Visitor management systems can provide automated watchlist screening to rapidly and reliably scan for known threats.
Upon scanning a guest’s photo and personal information, visitor management systems do a quick background check against the latest sex offender registries.
The system denies the sign-in if a visitor's name appears in the registry. Visitor badges will not print, and on-campus security can be automatically alerted. If your VMS is integrated with an access control system such as gates or doors, it can also deny entry into the building.
Watchlists and denied party lists keep your students safe and create an automatic record of attempted entries, including names, times, and dates.
The Benefits of Managing Campus Visits
Some of the top benefits of using a school visitor management system include
Improved School Safety and Security
Maintaining campus security and keeping students safe is a top priority for school administrators. For a long time, maintaining school safety meant employing several security guards and police liaisons to keep watch around campus. Schools use these with a visitor logbook at the main entry point.
With today's technology, we can do better. There is no longer an excuse to use paper visitor logbooks. Digital visitor logs are more efficient at handling sign-ins. They ensure all data is completed, provide legibility, verifiable time and date stamps, and create organized records to generate reports automatically.
Physical security guards are great to have in place, but in a manual system, there are big gaps. Digitizing communications, automating notifications, and allowing control through a central hub provide greater control and visibility over your entire campus. The result is a more agile and complete security structure, requiring fewer employees to achieve greater safety.
Today, visitor management improves security and school safety by:
- Providing guest tracking data in real-time to monitor visitor movements on campus
- Differentiating staff, students, vendors, and other visitors within the school premises
- Screening and keeping unwanted visitors off the premises
- Recording visitor sign-in information for future reference
These perks greatly enhance school safety and security, making your institution more desirable to parents, students, and staff.
Saves Time for Office Staff and Visitors
Manually checking in and checking out all guests visiting your school campus ties up your operational time and human labor. But a school visitor management system saves your staff time by expediting front desk processes.
When school visitors check in, they enter the requisite information digitally at the sign-in kiosks. The system can even capture photos and government IDs. If your office staff had to complete these procedures manually, sign-in and sign-out processes would be unnecessarily protracted. Even worse, guests would have to redo the process every time they revisited the institution.
A visitor management system remembers past data, meaning guests only have to swipe their credentials at the sign-in kiosk on their subsequent visits. It yields a two-fold benefit by saving time for both guests and employees, creating an ideal visitor experience.
Peace of Mind for Parents
The gains of investing in a quality school visitor management system go beyond operation and security optimization. A 2022 Gallup poll found that 44% of K–12 parents in the US worry about their children's physical safety at school.
As a school administrator, you win parents' trust by upholding staff and student safety. Parents deserve the confidence and peace of mind to send their children to your school. Investing in a school visitor management system helps earn parents' trust.
Parents will have more confidence in your school's security, knowing that strangers can't just walk into your campus without going through an identity verification process.
A Visitor Management Solution You Can Count On
School district administrators, principals, school owners, and all other professionals at the helm of school management constantly worry about improving school security to guarantee student and staff safety. They are legally obliged to keep students safe on campus, so these concerns are valid.
The great news is that visitor management systems give you the benefits of security management and more. VisitorOS's visitor management software, trusted by enterprises worldwide, is the ideal solution for your school. Improve your on-campus security and elevate your user experience by making the check-in and check-out processes more efficient.
