Cat Gonzales
Photography & Social Media Editor
Butler Community College has started to place new exterior prox cards around the El Dorado campus, which started the fall 2018, spring 19 semester. Including the prox cards, Butler has installed new motion activated cameras and remodeling the campus health and security building.
“It was a group project, between cameras and prox cards, but the total project came to $1 million,” Director Unified Communication/Deputy CIO Christina Byram said. “The plan today is we are securing our exterior doors, and interior doors have been done previously secured for other reasons.”
Once this project is completed, IT would like to work on dorm access in the future.
“We are starting with that base line,” Byram said. “Eventually we would like to move to the dormitories. We would like to remove the keys that everybody has to unlock their room doors to the prox cards. There’s a lot of work, and the cost really comes to the cables that have to be ran to each door, so the funding can sometimes be difficult. We always have to plan for the future and figure how long to fund for projects.”
The prox cards help with security around campus, but according to Byram, it is an expensive project.
“Unlike traditional keys, I don’t know who was here at 3 a.m.,” Byram said. “With the system, I know every door you have ever tried to scan even if you tried use your card on a door that you don’t have authorization for, I can see that in the system. So we can track, and we know where people are going and what people are doing if they are trying to access places that they shouldn’t be accessing. Cameras and the locks are a part of the physical security project, and it’s that we can secure our campus and make it campus safer for students, faculty and staff. If there was a tragic event on campus, we can lock down and secure our buildings with a click of a button.”
This project for the exterior and the few interior doors is predicted to be finished by March. In the future, Byram would like to see all the other interior doors that have not been prox carded yet.
“Would we like to see every door proxed? That would be excellent,” Byram said. “But do we have the funding? Probably not. So we have to decide what are important doors that we secure, and scouring the exterior doors are the most important because if we needed to lock down a building or buildings.”