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Physical Security
The Ins and Outs of Access Control at a Community College District
3/20/2008
Campus security takes many forms--emergency notification, monitoring for Web breaches, data privacy protection, video monitoring. But when was the last time you thought about the security offered by your school's doors?
Devitt Hartney, building system engineer for the 40,000-student San Mateo County Community College District in Northern California, thinks about them a lot. After all, the three colleges in his district have 75 buildings with a total of about 4,000 doors.Three years ago, the district, which includes Cañada College, College of San Mateo, and Skyline College, started putting to work an infusion of capital from a bond measure to upgrade the campuses. One aspect of the new construction was to evaluate security, and those doors presented a major problem: According to Hartney, nobody knew who had keys to which buildings. "All the campuses were built in the 1960s," he said. "In some cases that's how old the key systems were. Each campus had three or four master key systems, which was very difficult to keep track of... So we decided to migrate to a new system."
The district brought in TEECOM Design Group, a California consulting firm, to evaluate how the campuses were handling security. Hartney worked with security integrator Thomas Keller to create an access control scheme that would allow for better door access management. The challenge was to create a tiered system that would grant people access based on specific need. Whereas an instructor might need access to one building where he or she teaches a class once a week, a custodian would need access to multiple buildings during certain times of the day. Campus management would require even greater access, as would the campus police force.
A committee consisting of Hartney, the director of facilities for each school, as well as chief engineers, the head of security and a number of faculty members spent six months evaluating the options. TEECOM had come up with three vendor recommendations to supply the hardware and software for the new access control system. One candidate was rejected, said Hartney, because the company came across as too small to support campus needs. A second candidate's solution didn't include video integration. The third candidate, AMAG Technology, won the work with its Symmetry product suite.
Centralized Door Management
Now electronic hardware on the doors controlled and managed by computer handles building access. Hartney can enter a time schedule to lock and unlock the doors. "This prevents having security people or custodians running around to unlock doors so students can get into buildings," he explained.
On holidays and weekends, the buildings can stay locked, unless special events are scheduled.
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