Many parents and the School Board feel that there is not enough play space for the kids at Havens.

The Havens "Courtyard" is a very inviting space that helps give the school an open campus like feel.

The courtyard has a "Breezeway" gate that is currently locked and requires visitors to go through the main office to get a Visitor's badge to get to the rest of the school.

A suggestion was made to build a new gate along Highland Avenue that would allow opening up the Breezeway gate and letting kids play in the Courtyard during recess and/or lunch.

There are a number of security consequences to this new gate.

For one, the office would end up on the same side of the gate as the kids are. This would make it impossible to force visitors to go to the office for a badge.

Also the Fire department would like to be able to drive onto the courtyard if needed which might require a 16 foot sliding "driveway style" gate. It would be hard to ensure only one person goes through if this gate is opened.

A suggestion was made for buzzing visitors in with a gate video capture system. It would be hard for the office to find a way to recognize every parent, nanny and/or older sibling or grand-parent who might have a reason to be visiting.

An alternative idea was to provide key code access to parents (with physical custody) as part of the school registration process. The key codes would be changed annually. This would at least restrict access to the courtyard to parents with kids at Havens.