Automated school safety and operations provider, ScholarChip, has made a version of its Enterprise-class Visitor Management system available to eligible schools free of charge. The move is designed to provide K-12 schools, regardless of their budget, with at least a basic level of campus safety.

Dubbed Forever Free, the free version of ScholarChip's visitor management system includes two vital components: the ability to register and check in visitors, and the capacity to check visitors against a comprehensive database of sex offenders.

“All of us with deep concern about school safety, as well as providers of safety technology and solutions, have to ask ourselves a simple question: How can I help? Offering ScholarChip’s Forever Free Visitor Management is a step in the right direction,” says Maged Atiya, ScholarChip CEO/CTO.

Establishing an efficient and auditable access control process for visitors is a key element to any security plan. This, along with knowing the identity of every campus visitor, creates a culture of accountability and vigilance from which the K-12 environment can benefit.

The Forever Free Visitor Management System will enable users to enter data from a visitor’s driver’s license and automatically check ScholarChip’s extensive sex-offender database. School administrators will also know, in real-time, who is visiting their campus.

There are over 700,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, with each state, many Indian territories, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands each maintaining separate registries. The Department of Justice, too, maintains its own separate database for federal offenders.

ScholarChip integrates, verifies, and updates all databases downloaded from each available registry on a daily basis. This data is collected through the Department of Justice’s National Sex Offender Registry database, individual state offender databases, and third-party service companies.

“The national dialogue on school safety is a vital and continuing one, and we know that school budgets are tight,” says Atiya. “I’m glad that we are able to offer free visitor management to those schools that need it.”