By Liz Shepherd
InkFreeNews

WARSAW — Warsaw Community Schools’ Board of Trustees heard updates regarding school safety during a meeting on Tuesday, Nov. 9.

WCS Assistant Superintendent of Elementary Education Dr. David Robertson provided an update on “Raptor,” a program that WCS uses for school security.

Raptor enhances school security by scanning a visitor’s government-issued identification and comparing that information against a nationwide sex offender database, as well as trespass issuances placed into Raptor by the school district.

“We’ve used Raptor for the last five years for visitor retention processes,” said Robertson. “We made the decision about a year ago to expand to the full Raptor suite, which includes visitor manager, drill manager, Raptor Emergency, and Raptor Reunification.”

Currently, WCS has fully implemented the drill manager aspect of Raptor. This part of the program assists the school district with analyzing drill performance and improving protocols.

“Principals use their own drill manager to set dates and times for their drills,” said Robertson. “For fire drills, they can check month over month to see how much time it’s taking to evacuate the building. There’s really good data pieces with it. I really like it because it’s very customizable.”

Next semester, the Emergency Management aspect of the Raptor system will come into play. Staff will have an app on their school devices that provides access to building safety plans, as well as ask for emergency help at any location within a school. Staff would also have the option to download the app onto their personal devices as well.

Robertson also said there have been discussions with the City of Warsaw’s traffic safety commission regarding traffic control issues in the area of CR 200S, near Eisenhower Elementary School. The current issue is stalled traffic on the road while parents are waiting to drop off or pick up students.

Robertson serves as the school district’s representative for the city’s traffic safety commission.

“We acknowledge it’s an issue, and it’s probably an issue that’s going to continue since there’s growth in the Eisenhower area,” said Robertson. “We know there’s also a long-term plan from a city planning perspective for different traffic patterns in that area. We have a meeting set up with the city engineer and city planner to take a look at the bigger picture solution.”

A full update on the Eisenhower situation will be discussed at the school board’s December meeting.

The board also approved a resolution for a redistricted map for WCS during the meeting. Kosciusko County Geographic Information System (GIS) Director Bill Holder attended the meeting to explain census required changes for the map. He noted a lot of residential development within the Kohl’s and Walmart shopping area in Warsaw skewed some of the census numbers within the districts.

“The highest (school) district and the lowest (school) district have to be within 10% (of each other),” said Holder. “But because of that development in that (Walmart) area, we were looking at 15 to 20%. We’ve run through a number of different scenarios and have definitely got to one that follows that 10% rule.”

In total, Warsaw Community Schools has seven districts, which are determined by population, not number of miles.

Warsaw Community Schools Superintendent Dr. David Hoffert said the map will go to the county’s election commission.

Also during the meeting, Chief Financial Officer April Fitterling provided a brief construction update. She said materials for Warsaw Community High School’s Tiger Den roof have been delivered and that repairs, weather permitting, will be complete in about a week.

The board’s next regular meeting is at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 15, at Jefferson Elementary School.