Issue date: 9/10/09 Section: News

The Office of Residence Life is implementing a perimeter access system in an effort to improve safety and security on Truman's campus.

Residence Life installed the proximity card access system in the residence halls during the summer and will put it to use this school year.

"What the system will do is provide a much higher level of safety for the residence halls," said John Gardner, assistant director of Residence Life. "Right now the residence halls are very safe … now we have the better ability to monitor the doors."

The perimeter access system includes proximity card readers that allow access to residence halls when ID cards are held within a few inches of small black boxes mounted on the doors. Gardner said students' ID cards will be replaced by cards that work with the card reader system next semester.

Senior Cody Sumter, student representative to the Board of Governors, said the Board approved the money for the perimeter access system during the summer.

Due to limited funds, only three to six doors on each residence hall were equipped with the card readers, Gardner said. Other alarms were installed on the remaining doors.

The doors with these alarms will remain locked from the outside at all times, while the doors with the card readers will be unlocked between 6 a.m. and 10:30 p.m., as they currently are. All doors will remain exit doors at all times.

If any door is held open too long, the system will alert Residence Life, who then can check on the door and make sure the building is secure.

Because they are implementing the system in the middle of the year, it initially won't be a dramatic change.

"The way the system works won't probably have a lot of impact on students or on how they operate doors … except that some of the doors they've gone on in the past will be locked all the time," Gardner said.

He said Residence Life selected doors that were strategically placed so students could still have easy access to buildings. They considered where classroom buildings, parking lots and food service centers were, as well as students' traffic patterns across campus.

Access to residence halls after 10:30 p.m. will not be changed. Students still will enter through the main doors where a night monitor will swipe their ID card.

"At this point, we think we're going to keep that very consistent," Gardner said. "That's a system we like quite a bit because it's a very, very safe system in terms of knowing who's coming and going."

Continued...

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