FAIRMONT — Over past weeks, West Fairmont Middle School has become a destination of choice for state Homeland Security officials and others tasked with keeping students, teachers and staffers safe during the school day.
Right before the start of the academic year last fall, the school on 10th Street opened its doors to Rank One Computing, a Colorado-based global company that had just relocated its Eastern headquarters to Morgantown.
West Fairmont Middle, and Marion County’s school district, signed on with the company to deploy its facial recognition technology, day to day.
It’s the first school in the state to go with such a safety measure, said Chad Norman, who directs technology services for the district.
The aforementioned safety professionals, plus local and state lawmakers and school superintendents from other districts, have been dropping by West Middle to see the technology for themselves. Norman said Friday.
“We’re coming along pretty well,” he said.
“We’re building our database and getting people registered.”
Both of the above are critical to the process.
Profile pictures of regular visitors to such places — parents, other caregivers and vendors, in the case of Marion County Schools — will all be scanned and uploaded into a file, with notations.
The visual record is critical, as it’s also designed to keep away the people who are perceived threats, such as, say, a student suspended for fighting the day before who is now back in the parking lot with a gun in his pocket to settle up.
Or, that parent from a neighboring state embroiled in the middle of an acrimonious divorce and custody battle, who just rolled up on Friday afternoon to pick up his child for the weekend — no matter what the court says.
Anyone in that column of the list is immediately flagged, electronically, with a message sent to the database in the school building and the district’s central office.
Local law enforcement gets the same notification, and Marion County Sheriff Jimmy Riffle is already a proponent of the technology.
Which means, said Donna Heston, Marion’s superintendent of schools, that the front door isn’t being automatically buzzed open to allow someone to enter, for good or ill.
“A lot of school districts scan your driver’s license, but you’re already in the building by then,” she said last fall, as the pilot program was announced.
Norman, meanwhile, said the district is going to get even busier in the safety arena in the months ahead.
Plans are in the works to get the facial recognition technology into every one of the county’s 19 schools, he said.
Same for additional weapons detectors, he said, which are currently deployed at Fairmont Senior High School, East Fairmont High and North Marion High.
Counting its schools, plus a vocational technical center and two other alternative learning centers, Marion is home to 7,000 students.
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