Saving time and simplifying processes with key cabinets in a Texas school district

School buildings are rarely purely educational facilities, instead they serve whole communities, with church group meetings, sporting events, theatrical performances, and other activities. This makes access control a continuing challenge, especially for a large school district like Northwest Independent School District (ISD), which serves more than 30,000 students in 14 cities, towns, and communities across 234 square miles in Texas. The district was struggling to keep up with managing access for building rentals and community events. In their hunt for a solution, school officials decided to leverage a system they already had in place—intelligent key cabinets.

The schools had large Traka S-Series cabinets available for maintenance workers to be able to check out facility keys and to grant access to keys for rental scenarios, but the system wasn’t being leveraged to the fullest, says Mike Conklin, executive director for safety and security at Northwest ISD. The district expanded its use of the Traka key cabinets so now each school has a cabinet outside and visitors, maintenance, and law enforcement personnel can be granted access rights without a school employee needing to be on-site.

The V-Series cabinets, which are integrated with the district’s Motorola access control management system, update instantaneously so they reflect the most recent access management rights changes, such as when someone renting the facility broke a key off in the lock and needed quick access to a spare key.