Screening software does its job

New software that the Coeur d’Alene School District is using to screen visitors caught a registered sex offender working on a construction crew at Ramsey Elementary.

Superintendent Harry Amend said the new visitor-screening software alerted the school around noon Thursday that a member of the construction crew was a registered sex offender. He said the construction company doing the remodel handled the incident and that the worker will not return to the school site.

According to the state’s sex offender registry, the worker was convicted in 1998 of child molestation.

The district recently purchased the software, made by Houston-based Raptor Technologies, for all its elementary schools. The Post Falls and Lakeland school districts are also using the software.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Ramsey Elementary ran the IDs of construction workers through the optical scanner that comes with the software. The scanner picks up the name, date of birth and picture of the person visiting the school and that information is checked against sex offender registries from 44 states.

If a visitor’s information matches that of a registered sex offender, alerts are automatically sent to school administrators and law enforcement.

Carol Measom, marketing director for Raptor Technologies, said the school had a false alarm while screening a visitor earlier this week when the equipment was being tested. Measom said she thought, at first, that the school might be testing the equipment again when Thursday’s alert came in.

“We were kind of excited they tagged someone so soon and that it wasn’t a parent,” Measom said.