St. Rose students have a new card on their lanyard this year, and The Courier has the story behind it! The new swipe card system at SRHS might seem intimidating at first, but it’s here to make everyone’s day a lot easier. The production company, appropriately named “Swipe K-12”, has been making elementary schools and high schools all across the country a lot safer for many years. It’s new to St. Rose this year, so get excited! This article will reveal everything a swiper needs know. We spoke with Mr. Carey, Vice Principal, to get all the reasons why we installed Swipe.
Mr. Carey has a lot of great information on the new system. “The first reason is for school safety. Every person that comes into the school has to show their license, so we can do a background check. Second, to cut time down with attendance. The system processes much larger amounts of people in short amounts of time compared to attendance by hand, like we did last year. It can process around two hundred names in under three minutes.
Third, student tracking, especially for the flex periods. If we need to find one of the students for any reason, all we have to do is look for the last place you swiped in. Another reason is consequence management, for issues like lateness. Everything is automatically tracked and any consequences are automatically issued.” These consequences are the new student responsibilities for being late, like restricted lunch. This cuts down the time it used to take to email students warnings or issue them slips.
On the topic of safety, Mr. Carey says that with the new background checks and ease of student location, the school is much more secure. And that’s not all – he also says that taking attendance has sped up a lot compared to last year.
“Everyday, there are about two to three errors (maximum). Much less than when we did it manually.” When a card is swiped before entry to Convocation, the system automatically tracks presence as well as the time that it was scanned into the gym. Then, all of the teachers seen throughout the day know if that person is present in school or not. It simplifies the process in many ways.
Before the interview ended, I asked Mr. Carey for any advice to students that want to make their morning entrance to Convocation faster:
“Take off your lanyards when you come in the make it easier for you, make sure you scan your card correctly, and look to make sure your picture is on the screen before you take your seat.” If the picture on student ID cannot be seen by the scanner, the teacher that’s monitoring should be asked to check it. All it takes to fix an error is to swipe the card again.
Swipe K-12 is just one of the many interesting new additions to our school this year. For any additional questions about the system, reach out to a teacher for some help. Happy swiping!
