Smart Card IDs For Education

The same technology that corporations use for access control system: secure smart card IDs, can be used to improve school campus security as well. Embedded with “smart” features such as radio frequency identification (RFID) and tamper-resistant overlaminates, education campuses can realize a wide range of benefits, from tightening security, to streamlining admissions, to improving paid services with these types of ID card technologies.

Education is Ready For The Smart Card Revolution

Educators at all levels are seeking ways to leverage current technology to improve the quality of learning, simplify administrative tasks and protect students. However, leaner budgets, growing numbers of students and rising costs per student mean that schools must improve efficiency. Answering this challenge demands innovative solutions that will automate facility and class access, improve campus security and streamline campus services such as meal and library programs.

In many ways, schools have been slow to adopt technologies commonly used in the private business sector to streamline their operations. Student admission is still a manual, time-consuming process at the majority of primary education school campuses. Institutions of higher education campuses have adopted online admissions and class registration, but students still must stop by a main office in person and stand in line to pick up their student identification cards. Inefficiencies resulting from manual processes extend beyond the first week of school as student tardiness is an ongoing issue. Often students must stop by an office to pick up a handwritten tardy slip, wasting time better spent doing class activities. Many school districts depend on attendance numbers to maintain their funding levels and lower student attendance means fewer school budget dollars, but advances in smart ID card technologies and the surrounding infrastructure offer educational institutions the optimal solution for streamlining school administrative tasks.

Smart Access Cards What They Are, How They Work

The Intelligence of Embedded RFID

The term “smart access cards” in education, business and government applications encompasses a wide range of technologies. The common feature of most contactless, proximity card based solutions relies on embedded high-frequency (HF) RFID technology. Most contact type ID cards use magnetic stripe technology, which in this context requires students to manually swipe their smart card through an ID card reader, slowing down student access and creating bottlenecks in the flow of people entering and exiting. Magnetic stripe cards are also a less reliable ID card technology as they can be easily de-magnetized.

Education access ID card applications can benefit from UHF Gen 2 RFID’s ID card long-read range and fast identification capabilities. Schools can eliminate single-file, one-at-a-time ID card reads. Using Gen 2 RFID ID cards and card readers, groups of students can move through large, open entry and exit points, rather than having to pass through narrow doorways, gates or turnstiles single file. While conditions change in the business world, education facilities need solutions that can stand the test of time, future-proofed to last a student’s campus tenure. Made from durable materials such as polyester and PVC, secure ID cards can last the entire term of a student’s education, saving the institution and students the recurring costs of annual ID card replacement.

Security Efficiency and Cost Reduction

Just imagine: one ID card for everything! Smart cards can serve as the foundation for a wide range of ID card security applications, providing opportunities to streamline security and administrative tasks across an entire campus. The process starts during student admission or when faculty/staff receive their new hire orientation. It is here that the school issues a durable, smart ID card embedded with RFID technology. Once an education district implements smart ID cards, the technology serves as the ideal foundation for ongoing benefits, campus wide.

Tighten Physical Security and Facility Access

Student, Staff and Visitor Management

Security is more than just ensuring that visitors casually check in at an office. Protecting the safety of students and staff has become increasingly important. Other than hire enough security guards to police every facility and access point, what can education departments do to improve security today? Throughout the nation, many colleges and universities use visitor management systems to improve security and protect students against unauthorized visitors and people posing as students. While visitor management may seem like an issue only for K-12 facilities, college campuses are an open environment, making it difficult to monitor activity. School security departments must know who is on a campus at all times. The first step to doing this is to strictly enforce visitor sign-in and issue the visitor a temporary RFID-enabled ID smart card with track-and-trace technology capabilities. Upon sign-in, school visitor software can also determine if a visitor is wanted by law enforcement or if the person in question is registered in the sex offender database.

Access Control for Secure Buildings or Rooms

RFID enabled smart cards present the optimal solution not only for visitor management, but for access control for all people campus wide. Issuing a smart ID card to all faculty, students, staff and visitors allows security departments to control who has access to what, where and when. Campuses can improve dormitory safety, secure labs with high-value equipment and ensure research departments performing specialized projects only provide access to those with authorized credentials.

Optimally, schools can integrate their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with their ID card system, and in doing so, provide a single point of management for allowing or denying physical access to students attending classes in different buildings.

Time and Attendance Tracking

For many school districts, tracking the amount of time students spend in class is vital for planning and funding. To improve security and increase attendance rates, the Spring school district in Houston, Texas has distributed RFID enabled ID badges to 13,500 of its 36,000 students since December 2008. The technology replaces the manual attendance tracking that faculty previously had to perform for each class session and for each student. With RFID-enabled plastic ID card personalization and integration of digital ID camera photo identification solutions, schools can move from a handwritten to an automated approach. Smart access ID card solutions deliver a new level of accountability and enforcement that can help reduce the number of tardies. This wise investment of the school budget directly gives students more in-class time, while saving administrative time and money.

Streamline Library Access and Inventory Management

Campus libraries, printers and copy rooms should remain exclusive to students. With RFID ID card readers at the door, students entering a library or copy room can use their student ID card to gain access to the facility. Students can then check out books automatically, with all information recorded and loaded into the student database, eliminating the need for library checkout cards while also providing real-time information on the status of overdue books. Schools can use this information to lock students out of privileges until they return the books or deduct the book cost from the student’s debit fund.

Expand Paid Services

Expand Off-Campus Affiliate Programs

The large student populations at universities and college campuses fill the surrounding community with a captive consumer audience. Smart ID cards bring the campus and community together to generate value-added opportunities for local stores, restaurants and service providers when students use their school ID cards as retail and restaurant loyalty cards. Students can use their ID cards on or off campus and accrue credits and incentives for further purchases. Affiliate programs can also extend outside the local community into large franchises. When coupled with customer relationship management (CRM) databases, smart card purchases can provide valuable data for marketing metrics, enhancing affiliate programs even further.

Smart Card Printing Technologies

All the access card technologies described in this paper, including barcode, RFID, magnetic stripe, smart card, graphics and photo security features, can be printed on demand, wherever and whenever. Switching from pre-printed access cards, temporary ID cards and passes to on-demand ID card printing systems provides an immediate benefit by removing the worries related to managing and securing costly materials.

A barcode is the most widely used data storage format for security printing applications, and RFID is the fastest growing one. Common linear barcodes easily meet most needs for encoding visitor and employee ID cards. Two-dimensional (2-D) barcodes can encode significantly more text than linear codes and store digitized photos, graphics, fingerprint files and other biometric data. Smart card RFID ID card printing solutions provide multiple encoding and security technologies, including ID card holograms and magnetic stripes.

ADVANTIDGE offers education institutions complete identification management solutions for enterprise ID security. In most cases this starts with a secure ID card for staff and students with RFID for gaining access throughout the facility through the physical access control system.