Below is the audio of an interview with the Chief of District Security for the Val Verde Unified School District Chris Wynn. The entire transcribed interview is also available below and in the proceeding pages.

1) What is your background? How did you get into security systems?

I actually come from a long background in public safety, primarily in law enforcement. I was a firefighter paramedic for about six years, and then I did a 19-year career in law enforcement and was promoted up through the ranks of law enforcement. When I retired from law enforcement, I came to work for the Val Verde Unified School district as their Chief of Security. As far as my job here as the Chief of Security, not only do I oversee the department of security, which is security officers, I play a big role in researching and helping implement various types of security plans and protocols and technologies that are out and available.

2) What kinds of security systems are available for schools?

There are a lot of different things, starting from your most basic alarm systems that are out there. Just the act of having a system in place that secures the site when nobody’s there, I think that’s one that’s often overlooked, but is important. I think what we focus on most of the time is how we are protecting schools while students are here.

One of the most basic features is camera systems. There’s been a significant improvement in the ability to utilize camera systems, the quality of camera systems that are out there, as well as the ease of watching. It used to be camera systems would all dump into a single recorder and you had to have someone in front of it watching it. Now, we have cameras that record to servers, you can go back in time and look at them. With the system we have in place, I can actually monitor from my desktop, I can monitor from my iPad, I can monitor from my iPhone. I have the ability to look at my campuses, all 21 of my sites, at any given time by literally pulling my phone out of my pocket.

[One] system that we’re utilizing is a lobby management system where we’re registering and controlling access to our sites by requiring visitors who are going to enter into our secure portion of our sites to present a valid identification. It is scanned into a system that runs against the sex registrant database as well as an internal database that we create, meaning if we have court orders that are in place or they’ve been banned from our site for one reason or another. It will check their ID against that type of stuff to make sure that the only people coming into school are people we want to allow into our school.

The system also prints a universal identification badge. Previously, every site was responsible for making their own ID badges, and we had everything from stickers to plastic badges on yarn necklaces. Now, we have a single, universal ID badge that is recognized across the entire district as a person who is a visitor that is approved to be on campus. Those are kind of some of the bigger systems that are in use.

3) What are some steps a school should take when deciding on which security system to go with?

I think the Raptor system, which is our lobby management system, is probably the most recent one that we’ve taken from concept to full implementation. I think the first thing you have to do is figure out what you’re trying to accomplish. It can be relatively fool-hardy to sit down at a single vendor presentation and say oh, this is what we want, without really thinking about it or involving your staff, involving the cabinet level positions and finding out what you want this particular system to do.

Once you have an idea of what you want it to do, then I suggest finding out if schools in the area have something similar that you can do and look at. We actually went out and looked at a couple of different systems in the local area just to see if there was something we missed, are there other things that are possible, or does this system not meet what we’re looking for to begin with? Once we had those ideas, then we started contacting vendors.

4) How does a school manage a security system, and who should be involved with managing it?

The biggest pitfall schools can find themselves in is that they let somebody silo all the information in one place. When you’re looking at either the management or implementation process of it, you have to get people involved. I can tell you that I don’t know how the lobby of an elementary school works, so I have to go out to talk to people, the receptionists, the principal, and find out how that system works. They all have to be involved in the conceptual part of the process.

I think that converts a little bit once you get into the implementation phase. Obviously, in 2015, there’s technology tied into almost everything, so you really do need to get your information systems departments involved at a very early stage. Every IT department has different standards of their own IT security features. Whether something that’s web-based required servers, how it’s going to be protected, who’s going to have access to it, you have to get your IT folks on board with that quickly because what looks like a great idea to me may not be able to tie into our current technology system.

Finally, I think once you figure out who all these people are, you just need to make sure that you have policies put in place that talk about how they’ll be used. With any new technology and new idea, if it’s not used universally at all of your sites, you will find that it’s stopped being used.

5) What are some tips you would offer schools that need help with their security system?

If I could give any advice at all, it would be not to settle on the first vendor. Vendors do a good job of coming in and marketing their product. I think we looked at four or five different lobby management systems before we settled on Raptor, and it was solely because Raptor met our objectives. The other systems were all good, I don’t bad mouth any of them. They may work great on other sites, but they didn’t do what we wanted them to do.

The last thing that you really need to be reasonable about is prices. Security is not cheap. Every time I come up with a plan or a new idea, the first question that’s asked is money, and my response is almost always, “security is not free.” There’s nothing out there that makes security cheap. You have to be realistic because there are a lot of products that can price themselves right out of the market, but at the same time, you can’t put a dollar amount on security.

Jessica Kennedy is an editor at TechDecisions Media, targeting the higher education market. Jessica joined the TechDecisions team in 2014 and covers technologies that improve teaching and learning.