Thomas Chen: Everyday, when students walk into school through the Huss or Davern doors, they are first met by the security desks and officers. Yet, so little is known about who they are and what they do. Other than unlocking outside doors and sitting at their desks, what does security truly do? Hi, my name is Thomas Chen, and on this podcast episode, I talk to security supervisor Seamus Glewwe. Join us as we discuss the ins and outs of the lives of the security team.

Seamus Glewwe: My name is Seamus Glewwe. I am the security Account Manager here at St. Paul Academy and Summit School.

Chen: Nice. So first of all, how did you like, get into this job? What was the process? What did you go through to get here?

Glewwe: So my position, I was brought on from our contract security company. I went to college and got a degree, and then I started out in contract security, initially, just to pay the bills, and worked my way up. Bills, worked way up in there, developed experience in management and, you know, safety and security programming. I applied for the job here, I did a series of panel interviews with the administrators, and then I was offered the position after that, and I’ve been here for six years now. Most of the officers on our team come from internal transfers and security. They’ve worked in security for a varying number of years, with a variety of backgrounds. They will then also go through an interview process with our contracting company. Then they will come to site, and they’ll interview with me, and they will interview with these someone in the administrative team, most likely the Director of Operations, which is John Cole.

Chen: Sounds good. So what exactly is the relationship between the contracting company and SPA? Does SPA rent them out? What is it like?

Glewwe: So essentially, SPA hires the contracting company to manage the safety and security program and deal with sort of the the daily tasks of hiring, of setting up job duties, of potentially doing, you know, if there’s a corrective action or a write up that’s needed, they’ll take care of that on their end, freeing up SPA to focus on other things, the actual programming of like, how we want security ran at the campus, and how we want things done to campus is handled by SPA through me, I sit down with John Cole or administrators or the heads of school, and they tell me this is what we want our security program to look like, and then we build it from there for them.

Chen: Do you know what the name of that company is?

Glewwe: Yeah, American security.

Chen: Is that a popular one for most schools?

Glewwe: They, for a while, had the contract with St Paul Public Schools. Contract security. It changes a lot. It rotates a lot. Who’s who has what contracts for a variety of reasons. I know they have a few schools right now, but they’ve stepped away from doing the public schools. But when they took over here, they were doing all the public schools in the Twin Cities. American security is a pretty widely used regional security company. There are some other bigger like National competitors, but as far as in the Minnesota region, American security is pretty widely used.

Chen: What does a usual day in the life look like for you, or just the security officers at the desks?

Yeah. So we come into work in the morning. We’re usually the second person on site. Maintenance is usually in much earlier than us to get things turned on and get things powered up. We get in, we will power up the computers, make sure all of our systems are running properly. We’ll look at maybe events from the previous day. Sometimes they’ll be lost and found items or things like that. We sort through, we get set up, get our cameras and our alarms all set up, and then daily work for a security officer to desk is going to be a lot of customer service, really. They’re mostly and access control, right? They’re focused on the doors. They’re focused on making sure they know who is coming in, who’s going out, keeping an eye on the cameras that are outside of our facility, sort of focused on, like the entrances, and then just helping people when they come in, right? Oh, I’m here to see so and so. Let me get a hold of them. You can wait here verifying identities and then helping students or staff as they come to the desk. I would say, I would say, over half the job is customer service and access control, and then another 30% of it is probably just helping students or staff with questions at the desks. And honestly, only a small chunk of our daily work is probably what you guys would probably think of, like security work, or like we’re reviewing camera footage, or we’re stopping people from leaving, or that kind of thing. A lot of what we do is just customer service.

Chen: Speaking of the camera work, how does that work? Do you guys check out every day? Do you guys check the footage if a student lost something?

Gleww: So, yeah. So we have internal rules for when we review footage, who can review footage, who can save or look at footage. The cameras are really there as a recording device. We do have alarms that will trigger on motion, in some cases, to help us keep an eye on certain areas, but really it’s more of a passive recording tool. So yes, Stacey Tapp or Virginia Andres could come to us afterwards and say, Hey, student reported losing this or, Hey, we’ve lost track of a student, and maybe they snuck out to go to caribou or something, and we need to track them down. Can you review footage for us? Or, yep, they left their laptop on the third floor Commons. Can you see what happened to the laptop? And that’s a lot of what our review footage is when we do camera work.

Chen: Speaking of a day in the life, when do you guys get here? And when do you guys leave?

Glewwe: So security is on campus starting at 6:45 in the morning, and we have a security officer here till 10 at night. I am on call, 24/7, 365, we have an alarm company who monitors our overnight alarms, and so if a door gets opened or a window gets broken at 3am I get a phone call, and then I’m coming in to see what happened or what happened with that alarm, but we have physical security on site from 6:45 until 10pm except on Sundays, when we leave at six.

Chen: What is a part of the job you think a lot of people overlook or don’t know about?

Glewwe: Part of the job that I think a lot of people overlook or don’t think about would be how much of our job is we’re is focused on heading off issues for students or staff, where we’re paying attention outside. We’re noticing people parked in a no parking zone and they’re going to get towed. We’re noticing that on a snow emergency day, they parked on the wrong side of the road, and we’re sending emails and letting people know like, Hey, you’re going to get towed. Or we’re following up with people in the community who are maybe upset at a student or a faculty member for doing something out on the edge of the campus, and so that’s what a lot of our I think that’s doesn’t happen a lot, but something that I don’t think people really think about is how much of what we do is sometimes just watching out for all of you off campus to make sure that you don’t come out to a nasty surprise.

Chen: How would you describe how you and other security officers fit into the community here? Are you guys friends with the teachers? Do you guys talk with the students? How is that?

Glewwe: Yeah, I feel like the desk officers have integrated very well into the community. It depends on the individual, but I know many of them have friendships with individual staff and faculty. And I know, you know, Sammy, for instance, gets along very well with numerous kids. She knows them by their name. She knows what their activities are, you know, she’ll come in and tell me about so and so, as has an event tonight or so, and so is a concert on campus. And like, how do I know these things? So it really depends on the on the on the officer, but a lot of them have developed really good relationships with the faculty and the staff and the students. Yeah, it’s it just again, sort of personality and how close and personal they want to get in their work life.

Chen: Where do you find time to chat with others? Is it mostly at lunch?

Glewwe: I would say it’s mostly just sort of those, those moments when people come to the desk and, you know, a request for help turns into a brief conversation about their day, right? That’s what a lot of it is, is it’s, you know, a stop in the hallway to unlock a door turns into a chat about, oh, what are you studying? Oh, are you going to call Where are you going to college next year? Those kind of innocuous conversations that are going to develop out of just us helping and doing our routinely job, I think, is where a lot of those, lot of those moments happen.

Chen: How would the role of a security officer differ from someone who’s higher up and more behind the scenes here?

Glewwe: So, yeah, so that’s a great issue for like me versus like the line officer. So a lot of what I’m doing is more overarching and kind of program wise, where I’m having meetings with, you know, the administrators or the faculty and staff themselves to talk about like, what their ongoing issues are and what they want out of a security program, what they think a security program should look like. And so that’s what a lot of my work is. As I’m developing programs or I’m researching programs that are out there that we can maybe integrate into our community or into our school system, and the officers are kind of the frontline ones, where they are helping you find your lost laptop, they are unlocking doors, escorting people, kind of the grunt work. And so on a daily basis, I think a lot of times, the desk officers are more busy than I am, as far as like, they’re getting turned 10 different ways, with 10 different topics or issues.

Chen: I feel like a lot of students have questions about the door policy. When can you open the doors? How can you use the doors to go outside? Is it allowed to cross the lawn using the outside doors during the school day?

Glewwe: So the door, the door policies are a little they can come across a little confusing, because they do vary a little bit during the day of what’s allowed and what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. If I had my way, no one would ever use the outside doors for anything under any circumstances, from a security perspective. But I do know, you know, students are allowed to run to their vehicles to go grab things to come right back in. We do unlock the patio doors for student. To go out and eat lunch on the commons. I know that a very common crossing route is that shilling door to the to the dining hall, so I know what happens. And those policy decisions are something that we talk we talk ourselves amongst security operations and then the administrators of that school, and they talk about how they would like the students, you know, basically how they want the student experience to be, and we kind of try to marry that with what security concerns we have. So it can be a little confusing, but you are allowed to use the doors to go out to your vehicle. You need to let us know so we know where you are. You are allowed to cross the lawn, but again, the Schilling door should be locked so you can’t go back that way. It’s a one way pass, and then obviously the lily courtyard doors on either side are open for crossing in the courtyard there, so you are allowed to use those spaces. You know, just exercise good judgment, close the doors behind you. Don’t prop doors open.

Chen: And then maybe one of the last questions here. What’s your favorite part of the job? What do you enjoy about it, personally?

Glewwe: My favorite part of the job, like, where we get the most I feel like we get the most excited, and I think I can speak for most of the officers in this is when we’re able to help someone solve a very stressful problem, right? I think about, like, the biggest one that comes up is, right, when someone has lost an item that is very precious to them, and weren’t able to use the cameras to locate exactly where it is, and were able to get a resolution and something they thought was gone forever, they’re actually able to get back. And the relief they see and the relief they feel is very, very rewarding. So I would say being able to help people fix very stressful things that they don’t think they’ll have a solution to, and being able to actually give them an answer a solution to the problem, is probably the most rewarding part of the job.

Chen: Okay, last question. If students have any concerns about policies, or if they want to make any requests, or if they want to make some change in how our school functions. How would you advise them?

Chen: So I know the student body. I don’t know if the elections have happened yet for your student body, but I do know once those positions are set up for like the president and the co-president, we have had meetings with them in the past, in past years about their their security concerns, or what they would like to see different about policy or procedure when certain areas are locked or unlocked. And specifics are escaping me right now, but we have had resolutions out of those where the student body has come to us and said, hey, you know, closing up this area right after school doesn’t work for us, and we have made changes and arrangements about that. So I would say, going to your student body, elected group, and then also potentially going, if you know, if in the high school, going to Stacy Tepp, going to many and raising your concerns. They are, it might not seem like it, but they are very vocal to us. So if you reach out to them, they are going to send us an email and say, Hey, this concern has been raised by the students. What can students. What can we do about it? And then in the middle school is sort of the same thing. If you go to Virginia, if you go to Ellen and raise those concerns, they will reach out to us and let us know. So I say your elected student body officials or your administrators at their school. Yeah.

Chen: That’s it for this podcast episode. I hope you learned something interesting and new about the security team that constantly works to keep our school running. Check out more episodes about various topics at rubiconline.com. Thanks for listening.