LEWISTON — The district has been given a $500,000 grant to bolster entrance and building safety in the schools, Superintendent Jake Langlais announced during Monday’s School Committee meeting.

The grant is funded through the Department of Justice, William Grant, executive director of operations for the school district, said Monday. Announced last week, the funding comes through the School Violence Prevention Program, which is part of Community Oriented Policies and Services, which is part of the Department of Justice, Grant said.

“The main purpose is to look at access controls, see how we have access to our buildings,” he said. “We’re gonna be exploring some new technologies with that, trying to make sure that all of our schools are on the same platform,” Grant said. “Some of our schools were on a different technology than the other ones. We’re trying to streamline that.”

Grant explained what the district plans to do with the funding. “Almost all of our schools are completed with an update, but we were running three systems, now we’re running two systems. So, what we’d be trying to do is get all of those badge controls onto one system,” he said.

The new system will allow the schools to identify, warn against and follow intruders, linking access control and cameras together. “If a door were left open and somebody came through that door, it would sound an alarm, but the cameras would be alerted too and they would follow that person through the school,” Grant said.

“This bump will allow us to expedite and get out to one platform, which is something we thought would be two, maybe three years out,” Langlais said.

Addressing a question from Ward 7 committee member Donna Gallant about maintenance costs, Langlais said the technology might provide other services for the district now that “our system will have a more robust backbone.”

“The systems require cloud-based computing and storage,” he said. “We subscribe to those services, so it’s part of operation budget. That is (the) ongoing annual cost. Camera replacement, life cycle, life span of the cameras, that’s all part of our thinking.”