The future is here at St. Georges Technical High School

In late February, the school began using a new visitor registration system called Swipe K12, which uses state-of-the-art technology aimed at providing schools with extra security and greater control of those who enter the premises.

St. Georges is one of the four technical high schools in New Castle County using the system.

The Swipe K12 is a self-service kiosk located by the school’s front desk which requires visitors to insert a photo identification card into a card-reader which scans the person’s information, adds it to a database, and checks it against sex offender lists. The system prints out a visitor badge with the person’s name, reason for the visit, date, and the photo from the scanned ID card.

School staff, like Marilyn Jones, who works at the front desk, has praised the new system because it allows visitors to check in quicker while at the same time keeping the school safe from sexual predators.

“It’s made my life a lot easier,” Jones said. “I always walk through the first-timers and they learn it easily. I haven’t had any repeaters.”

The new system also allows school administrators to customize information for each student. For example, the system can detect if a parent or guardian can be allowed or not to see or take the student home, thus preventing parental kidnappings or family abductions.

Another capability of the system is to automatically send parents a text message if their son or daughter arrives to school late.

This week, the system at St. Georges began to take teachers’ attendance. There are a number of scanning stations in the school building where teachers can check-in for the day.

One capability that hasn’t been put to use yet at any of the schools is to allow the system to take students’ attendance. Steve Mancini, the supervisor of information and instruction technology, said that the district is holding off on that for now.

“We’ll be evaluating the system for some of these capabilities, especially for taking students’ attendance,” Mansini said. “It’s all been rolled out in phases.”

Some 60 school districts in 25 states are currently using Swipe K12, according to Phillip Lee, the director of sales at the eight-year-old, Maryland-based company.

Technical schools in New Castle County are the only ones using the Swipe K12 system in the state, and they are also using the newest version, Lee said.