Brick Security Referendum Fair Prompts Board Meeting Change

BRICK, NJ — The Brick Township Board of Education has rescheduled its Nov. 1 meeting, citing a desire to focus on the Oct. 29 public information session on the district's security referendum and to wait for the results from the Nov. 6 election.

The meeting is now scheduled for 7 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 15, at the district's Professional Development Center at the Veterans Memorial schools' complex, 101 Hendrickson Blvd.

The district's referendum on the Nov. 6 ballot seeks approval to spend $12.5 million for security upgrades at the district's schools, including cameras, locking mechanisms and IDs, and for many of the buildings, reconfigurations to create secure entry vestibules that limit building access.

A full presentation on the proposal and the proposed bond ordinance that would support it was held in August, but the district scheduled the Oct. 29 information session to give parents and residents opportunities to ask specific questions about the plans for each school. Administrators from across the district will be on hand, the district said,

The referendum fair is set for 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Oct. 29 at Brick Township High School. A copy of the presentation is posted on the school board's website.

The $12,580,000 proposal in the referendum includes the following:

• The construction of contained entrance vestibule and main office renovations that create contained entryways in all of the district's schools that lack them. The goal is to prevent people from having immediate access to the entire school from the building's main entrance.
• A visitor management system called Hall Pass that reads a driver's license and can flag people who should not have access, whether it's a child custody issue or something else.
• Updated and expanded video surveillance coverage.
• A situational awareness system called CLASS that, among other features, allows all classroom doors to be locked with the press of a button the in main office in the event of an active shooter or similar threat in the building.

The vestibule construction is the most costly part of the referendum, totaling more than $8.2 million. Most of the district's schools do not have secure vestibles as they were build as much as 60 years ago, long before school shootings were an issue.

The CLASS system — Crisis Lockdown Alert Status System — is estimated at $2.3 million and includes the ability to alert police immediately while also alerting the staff and students in a building to an issue and can be customized to the school district's needs.

The Hall Pass visitor management system scans government-issued identification that checks the person's name against national registry lists, keeps track of who has visited the school and when, and can be programmed to identify teachers, staff, substitutes, contractors and so on.

The full presentation from the Aug. 9 school board meeting is below. It begins 53 minutes into the video and starts with a presentation by Dennis Filippone, the district's director of planning, research & evaluation on the entire safety and security evaluation in the wake of the shootings in Parkland, Florida, last February.
The referendum is included on the Nov. 6 general election ballot because a special election would have cost the district $50,000, funds that Board President Stephanie Wohlrab said the district could not afford to spend.

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