The card printer company Evolis with ScholarChip, a smart card firm, reports the roll-out of a multiservice student and staff ID card for public schools in Baltimore.
These IDs will serve as a single credential for multiple uses, such as access control and for identification and library services, plus attendance monitoring and bus attendance to and from schools.
In January, The Baltimore County Public Schools awarded a contract to ScholarChip, to bring in card-based student and staff IDs as part of their automated student attendance services, called BCPS OneCard. The District required the card to be operable and work with their legacy proximity (125 kHz) door access system, so as to avoid the expense and hassle of replacing the existing hardware. However, the attendance services required using the secure and open Mifare standard.
Terrence McGivney, Director of Sales at ScholarChip, said: “ScholarChip has a long development relationship with Evolis, and we have issued well over one million smart IDs to the K-12 school market with Evolis printers so far. Based on our own experience, and leveraging the versatility of the Primacy printer from Evolis, we came up with a simple, yet proven solution to support legacy systems while enabling new features: a dual-frequency encoder embedded in the Primacy printer from Evolis, to print and encode all IDs. With this solution, smart IDs are issued in one pass for use with both ScholarChip’s attendance services and the existing door access system.”
ScholarChip deployed 169 card issuance stations, pictured, each containing an Evolis printer. These stations have already delivered 19,000 full-colour staff IDs. They are also expected to deliver 103,000 student smart IDs to capture attendance in real time, when students enter 173 school buildings and over 7,000 classrooms, by simply ’tapping’ their contactless cards on a ScholarChip Attendance Kiosk, a classroom reader, or an NFC-enabled tablet.
Single card
Jean-Charles Pichon, Sales and Project Manager, Evolis Inc, said: “Integrating a dual-frequency encoder in the Evolis Primacy line is a great way to ensure backward compatibility with legacy systems. Primacy offers the advantages of delivering multipurpose cards that leverage existing and emerging technologies, while at the same time keeping the access control infrastructure unchanged. Proposing to customers the use of a single credential for all their services is an additional advantage.”
The firms add that such cards can be upgraded to support other services as and when required: in 2015, such cards will be used to capture students’ attendance as they hop on and off 884 school buses. Visit evolis.com.
