Lock changes in residence halls bring added features

Over the summer, Waynesburg University’s residence life staff rolled out a new door lock system for all seven of its residence life systems, changing from a swipe to a tap system.

According to Heidi Dziak, assistant director of residence life and housing, the new system provides an added level of security. She said the new system allows her to see a log of who has used their key to enter a building.

“Say I need to see who keyed into a building at 8 o’clock on Tuesday to Burns. If I look at security footage, it may not show me their face, maybe their face is covered. But I can go and look at the system and see what person keyed in at that time. It gives me a report of what card was used when,” Dziak said.

“Say I need to see who keyed into a building at 8 o’clock on Tuesday to Burns. If I look at security footage, it may not show me their face, maybe their face is covered. But I can go and look at the system and see what person keyed in at that time. It gives me a report of what card was used when,” Dziak said.

Photo by Tim Durkin

Dziak said the new system also eliminates the need for temporary key cards. In previous years, students who remained on campus needed to use a temporary key card during that time because their normal card was not programmed to work over the break. Now, residence life staff can give cards access to any door at any time.

Likewise, the new system eliminates the need for master keys, Dziak said. A resident mentor’s normal key card can now be programmed to unlock any doors that are needed, and the card can be turned off immediately from the residence life office. In previous years, residence life staff would need to swipe an invalidation card in every single door on campus when a master keycard was lost; there are 483 doors on campus.

“It was also not really secure, either. Let’s say you found my card and were mad at someone, you could key into their room and they would never know if you got there before I did. But now, if someone loses their card, I can shut off right there and then,” Dziak said.

The new system also allows residence life staff to remotely unlock doors for students who lock their keycard in their rooms.

“We can actually unlock your door from here, I’ve had to do that a couple times when my card wasn’t working or a resident mentor’s card wasn’t working so I can manually unlock their door from my computer,“ Dziak said.

If a student’s card is not working, Dziak said there are several possible causes. For one, the problem could be on residence life’s side with the data not being pushed through to the office’s computer system. Another cause could be the batteries in the lock running out of power, or the cards themselves being damaged.

“If a student bends their cards or hole punches them, that will ruin the card and their card won’t work anymore,” Dziak said. “That’s a potential problem, if they put the card in their wallet and sit on it and bend the card, it could potentially damage it.”

Since the locks are connected to WiFi, a power outage could also knock the system offline. However, Dziak said that there have been no significant issues so far this semester, and doors have had a 99% success rate.