Nanuet Superintendent Details Safety Upgrades Coming Next School Year

The Nanuet School District will see some school safety upgrades next school year, and they were made possible thanks to two grants obtained by local state elected officials.

At Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Mark McNeill laid out a few details for two projects coming to the school district. One is the Fast-Pass identity identification system and the other is an upgrade in surveillance cameras both inside schools and around the outside the buildings. McNeill said the upgrades are a response to the attack at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT. last year.

“Obviously both of these upgrades are a response to the tragedy that took place Dec. 14th,” McNeill said. “We feel that this is an appropriate expenditure of money that comes from a line item in the budget. Annually, the budgets include a line item specifically for capital improvements, or improvements to our infrastructure and we’re going to use next year’s money for those two items.”

The first upgrade was made possible by a $20,000 grant secured for the district by State Sen. David Carlucci. The Fast-Pass system will identify and log individuals who enter the high school by making them swipe their driver’s license. Seniors at the high school will have their ID cards tied to the system, so they can just swipe a scanner to enter the building.

“For adults and visitors, they have to walk up to the system and the greeter will take their license and will scan the license and will issue a pass right from the license,” McNeill said. “No longer will a person write down their name and be issued a pass. The pass will be printed automatically. It’s tied into a file server, which is tied into a national database, as well as possibly an internal database that we can control in the event that there’s an individual that we know we do not wish to have come into the building.”

The Fast-Pass is owned by Sisco Identification Solutions.

The upgrade in cameras comes from part of a $50,000 grant secured for the district by Assemblyman Ken Zebrowski. McNeill said the district will upgrade its video surveillance system to a state-of-the-art digital recording system. He added that the board will talk more in detail about the new system at its May 7th meeting.

But on Tuesday night, McNeill said the plan is to replace the current cameras, which sit in those tiny black bubbles hanging from the ceiling.

“We’re going to be replacing those and adding others, others where right now there’s no camera to allow us to ensure that it’s being observed,” he said. “It’s a public area, like the back stairways in both the middle and high schools, as well as cameras outside the perimeters of the building.”