County schools ‘years’ away from letting kids use key cards
By Bobby Bryant, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
Plans for using electronic key cards to open doors at Darlington County public schools are still on track, but the system will slowly be phased in for teachers and staff, and it will be “years” before students might start using the cards to come and go.
Diane Sigmon, executive director of technology for the county school district, said officials plan to cautiously and methodically begin letting employees use key cards, but said this will happen over a long period of time.
Once district officials are satisfied that the system works for adults, Sigmon said, they will look at slowly bringing students in. But she said there are no hard and fast deadlines for any of this, and she said that if the district does extend the electronic-entry technology to kids, it will be “several years” from now.
Key cards are part of the district’s nearly $5 million plan to upgrade security at the county’s nearly two dozen schools. Most of that money will pay for a web of surveillance cameras that are much more sophisticated than the district’s current cameras; officials had been aiming to install that new system by November. The key cards are a more distant goal.
Sigmon briefed the Darlington County school board on plans for the key cards during a Sept. 23 board work session. “Our plans are … to start with the adults,” she said. “All of our employees already have the RFID badges. What we’ve got is compatible with what we’re putting in, in terms of the equipment on the doors.”
Key cards would let the district “schedule when they can have access to those doors, or not have access to those doors,” Sigmon said. “Once we have this working smoothly, then we can consider (extending it) beyond the adults, particularly at the high schools, where we have some campuses that are pretty wide open.”
“But that’s not a foregone conclusion,” she added.
If the power is out, a battery-powered backup system would let key cards keep operating for a while. The ultimate backup would be ordinary keys, Sigmon said.
The district also plans a “mass-notification system” for emergencies that would use “as many venues and formats as possible,” Sigmon said. “It might be a call to the phone in a classroom. It might be the overhead paging system. It might be a text to their phones. …
“Each one is used in special circumstances. For example, if you had an active-shooter situation – the reality is that when we’re planning these things, we need to plan them thinking about, ‘What if this happened? The absolute worst-case scenario’ – you might not want to use the overhead paging system to communicate with your teachers. You might want to communicate with them via a text to their phone, or with a call to their classroom. …”
The school board also discussed major repair and maintenance projects that are going to be necessary in the near future, such as a $300,000 to $500,000 upgrade to the heating and cooling systems in the district’s headquarters building. Some of the offices in the building don’t have air conditioning or heating, said Larry Johnson, assistant superintendent of administration and operations for the school district.
The board also took up another issue on the horizon – the fate of the 200-year-old St. John’s Elementary School in Darlington, which serves about 700 students. The historic school’s age is making repairs and upgrades more difficult and more expensive, and the board indicated they are willing to deal with the SJE issue sooner rather than later. District Superintendent Tim Newman said the future of SJE is a priority for the district.
It’s assumed that the district would need to build a new school for the student population. That would mean a referendum asking voters to approve the money. Some board members suggested the SJE property might be developed into housing for teachers.
Board member Charles Govan said the district is going to have to find ways to “get people to buy into” whatever plan is chosen, and to “educate” residents about what the district wants to do and why.
School board member Connell Delaine continued the SJE discussion the next day at a meeting of Society Hill Town Council, where he briefed council on school district projects. (Delaine represents the Society Hill area.)
“St. John’s in Darlington is a nice place … but it’s costing us an arm and a leg to keep up,” Delaine told the council. He said he hoped that the plan for dealing with the SJE issue would enhance Society Hill.
“Why does everybody get a new school but us?” asked Town Council member Carolyn Oliver. (The district is currently building three new elementary schools – one in Darlington, one in Lamar and one in Hartsville.)