The light of the ID card scanner flickers green only to turn red again. The door won’t budge, even after you tug at it intensely. The feeling of being locked out when you need to be in the theater and your friends have to come to open the door for you can be frustrating, but it is a frustration worth coping with.

The security team decided to lock academic buildings after 5 p.m. for a reason. Although having all buildings open to student access whenever one needs can sound convenient, it disturbs the unseen work of those who guarantee us a safe and comfortable campus to return to each day.

As the campus gradually clears and the usual bustle of activities dies down to scattered co-curriculars, the small inconvenience of facing a locked building will bring convenience to the security team and safety to all. Imagine the work of keeping a 96-acre open campus filled with thousands of dollars’ worth of technology and over 200 students safe; it can’t be easy.

Victor Seguinot, the head of security, said, “Our campus is shared with the Dobbs Ferry residences, so we have to be tighter when it comes to security because you can never tell who’s coming into the buildings.”

As the night starts to fall, the task of monitoring this campus becomes increasingly challenging, and, as you can imagine, having all the buildings open to all ID cards will definitely not alleviate the challenge.

Having the doors locked will also help security to identify suspicious persons, and keep track of everyone that is in the building. Through their S2 Net Box security system, they are able to monitor everyone who attempts to enter a building and the door their ID card was used on. Seguinot said that they are able to see the location through one of the over 80 security cameras around campus and watch the activities in that area to make sure that nothing is out of place.

These are just a couple of the many things the security team considered when they decided to lock most buildings after 5 p.m. “That’s our job as security people here, to make sure that you’re safe and secure, and everything is fine and going well,” Seguinot said.

However, just because your ID will no longer unlock a building does not mean that you cannot access the building at all. If you want to enter a building after hours, you can just call security to let you in, according to Seguinot.

“If it’s a larger group, then a teacher can let us know ‘there’s a large group of kids coming into the library, can you please have the door open for us at that time?’ and we will,” he said.

While the security team is working hard to keep Masters safe, the custodial staff is keeping it clean and comfortable. As one can imagine, it isn’t easy to clean a building that only hours ago had been filled with teenagers, some sweaty, some holding coffee and wrappers that they might later drop, or place in an obscure corner and never retrieve. Now imagine doing that work with those teenagers still strolling around, leaving muddy footprints on the freshly-cleaned floor and sweat stains on the door handles.

After a long and often exhausting day, we are able to leave campus or return to our dorms to leave the day’s stress behind, but the staff is still there, and for some of them, their work has just begun. We all understand the exhaustion after a long day’s work, but by simply dealing with the frustration of a locked Masters Hall or Morris, we are taking some of the burden off the security team and custodial staff. These are the people who put in their best effort every single day to try and make our days worry-free, so let’s do our part in lightening their burden.