When they go home for the holidays, the residence hall will shut down all access doors to everyone but the maintenance teams that work there. The new system also helps residence hall staff monitor the arrival of students at their dormitory rooms.
But upgraded magnetic card access control isn’t the only thing these two institutions have in common. According to General Manager Angelo Faenza of PERSONA, an access control and security consulting firm based in New Haven, Conn., schools like UW-GB and Quinnipiac have developed a process for improving safety on their campuses that works.
“University administrators should look at how these two schools have developed a cohesive decision making process for improving the safety and security of their students as well as their faculty and staff,” he says. “Other colleges can learn how to integrate their academics, residence hall and student life programs with a unified approach to access control.”
Faenza says both colleges followed the steps listed below to update their access control solutions and other security/life safety systems, as well as improve the overall preparedness of their campuses.
1. Bring the college decision makers together to set up a cohesive strategy for determining the best ways to use access control products or other safety solutions. At Quinnipiac and UW-GB, Faenza says both universities formed executive committees with representatives from various campus departments to determine how to effectively use their one- card student identification credential.
“For these groups to work effectively, there is a need for give and take,” Faenza says. “Add in the cost factor, and it takes time for colleges and universities to make significant changes within their security environment. The campus security folks want to lock everything down, while the residence hall manager wants to give students their freedom to come and go as they please. A cohesive group needs to reach middle ground and then make a policy for the use of ID cards.” The committees at both campuses created a policy for the use of access control credentials in everything from securing a room to purchasing lunch.
At Quinnipiac, representatives from campus security, residential life, student affairs, financial administration and the IT department met for six months to define what they wanted their mag stripe cards to do for students. Based upon the recommendations of the university’s executive steering group, Quinnipiac University had a well defined set of requirements for security integrators that wanted to bid on the college’s request for proposal.
At UW-GB, Randy Christopherson, the school’s director of public safety and the police chief, says his campus required a system that created an interface between several systems, including the student information system, housing administration system, and the PERSONA access platform for the one card program to work. It took several months of collaborative work by the university, PERSONA programmers and other staff to complete the transition.
