Permian would like to see similar results on its 2,200-student campus. Like Belen High, it's a relatively safe school. But its administrators know that their counterparts in Littleton and Conyers thought the same of their schools. At Permian, Sandia is using both low tech and high tech. Student identification badges will not only immediately show who belongs and who doesn't but also contain bar codes school administrators can instantly scan to show everything from previous tardiness and truancies to medical records.
Visitors receive high-tech badges that are good only for a day and fade to blank thereafter.
Outside the school, new perimeter fencing and cameras help control and monitor access to parking lots. Inside, tiny wireless cameras in black boxes will monitor classrooms. To safeguard such valuable school property as TVs and VCRs, Sandia has implanted each appliance with coded microdots that contain the name of the school and a serial number, which makes equipment easier to identify and recover. Ironically, all this comes amid statistical signs of an overall decrease in school violence. During the past school year, according to the U.S. Justice Department, there were about half the number of school-related violent deaths as there were six years earlier.