Does requiring parents and other visitors to provide personal identification to determine whether they are registered sex offenders violate the visitors’ constitutional rights? According to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in affirming a decision of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, the answer is, “No.”
Plaintiffs-Appellants Larry and Yvonne Meadows challenged the Raptor Visitor Management System and its implementation by the Lake Travis Independent School District in Texas. As parents, the Meadowses claimed requiring Mrs. Meadows to provide a state-issued photo ID as a condition of entering secure areas where students were present violated constitutional rights to speech, assembly, association, freedom from unreasonable search or seizure, privacy, procedural due process, substantive due process, and various aspects of state law.
The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the school district and assessed costs against the Meadowses. The Court of Appeals issued a ruling on September 8, 2010, upholding the decision of the district court.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the parents were not denied the ability to make fundamental decisions about their children’s education. The Court held the school district, “…has a compelling interest in determining, inter alia, whether a potential visitor to its school is a registered sex offender. The regulation is narrowly tailored because Raptor takes only the minimum information necessary to determine sex-offender status, identify the visitor, and ensure the lack of false positives.”
The Court further ruled that Fourth Amendment claims of unreasonable search and seizure also failed. “Even if this were to be construed as a search or a seizure, we would hold it to be a reasonable one,” the Court concluded.
“This court case is just one example of the struggle school districts encounter when it comes to providing the best security for children. The Fifth Circuit Court’s ruling helps define the rights of the schools to control their environment,” said Allan Measom, President and CEO of Raptor Technologies, based in Houston, Texas.
Raptor is a widely used provider of school visitor management systems which screens visitors for registered sex offender status in their client schools throughout the United States.
“We are pleased with the Court’s ruling,” said LTISD Deputy Superintendent and General Counsel Susan Bohn in a written statement on the ruling. “Throughout the long process of defending our position, we believed—as the Court did—that the Raptor system is a reasonable tool that works to ensure the children of our District are safe at school. Because campus safety and security are our highest priorities, we will continue to take measured and appropriate steps to protect our students, staff, volunteers, and visitors.”
The school district prevailed in a Texas court on a related state lawsuit, according to its written statement, and is awaiting the decision of a state appeals court on that case.
Ken Trump
Visit School Security Blog at: http://www.schoolsecurityblog.com
Raptor Technologies is currently being investigated for data breach.
Raptor Technologies has a security software for K-12 schools nationwide, even the Houston Zoo, Children’s Museum, YMCA.
On January 11, 2024, Wired reported on a data breach involving an unsecured database at Raptor Technologies. Raptor has confirmed the data security incident and if they confirm that the leaked data contains confidential information of individuals, they will begin sending out data breach notification letters to all individuals whose information was affected.
According to third-party research, over 4 million records relating to the Texas-based Raptor Technologies were allegedly compromised by a data security incident. The records contain what appears to be sensitive information relating to students, teachers, parents, and school safety plans or procedures. An investigation is ongoing and it is currently unknown how long the database was exposed or who accessed the data.
How can educators know if a company is taking security seriously? Raptor said all of the right things on their website about what they were doing and, yet again, it looks like the company wasn’t forthright. And so, maybe this is a pattern.
State data breach rules have long focused on personal information, like Social Security numbers, that could be used for identity theft and other financial crimes. But the consequences of data breaches like the one at Raptor, could be far more devastating — and could harm children for the rest of their lives. Exposure of health records, which could violate federal privacy law, could be exploited for various forms of fraud. Discipline reports and other sensitive information, including about student sexual abuse victims, could be highly embarrassing or stigmatizing.
Meanwhile, exposure of confidential records about physical security infrastructure in schools, and district emergency response plans, could put kids in physical danger.
Details about campus security infrastructure have been exploited by bad actors in the past. After Minneapolis Public Schools fell victim to a ransomware attack last February that led to a large-scale data breach, security records, including campus blueprints that revealed the locations of surveillance cameras, instructions on how to disarm a campus alarm system and maps that documented the routes that children are instructed to take during an emergency evacuation.This literally is the blueprint for what happens in the event of a shooting.