The son of a policeman, Building Monitor Daniel North developed a security-forward mindset from a young age.

“I grew up with [a father who was committed to security. He was] in charge of the Atlantic County Police Academy for about 12 years,” said North. “When I was in high school, he kept asking me if I wanted to be a police officer, but [I’d been around the job for so long] that I just didn’t want to [be one].”

North grew up in Atlantic City and has lived in New Jersey his entire life. Before working as a building monitor at PHS, he worked at an airport as a Security Coordinator and served in the military for 15 years.

“We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up, so there wasn’t really any way for me to go to college. [So,] I decided to join the military [after high school. First of all, it was] to serve my country, [but also] for the steady paycheck, and to be able to [benefit from] their college program,” North said.

After serving in the military, North began to get more involved with security jobs, eventually starting work at an airport where he managed security operations.

“[As the Security Coordinator], I got to deal with a lot of different people. I handled all the background checks for the IDs. I dealt with the state police, and in some cases the FBI, TSA, Department of Homeland Security, including all the other security workers at the airport,” North said.

After the airport he was working for lost its contract, North started his own home inspection business, Fair and Square Home Inspections. Its mission statement was “Knowledge, professionalism, integrity.” North now uses this mission statement every day in his job as a building monitor.

“I went with those keywords for my business because that’s the way I’ve always lived my life. I’ve found, from a very young age, that … I don’t ever want to go to bed thinking that I haven’t done the best that I could that day, knowing that I had just kind of phoned it in,” said North. “There [are] a lot of people that are comfortable living that way… but that’s not me.”

Despite the significant shift from owning an independent company to working under a school administration, North believes that he is able to work well with his co-workers and succeed in his job.

“The most rewarding aspect of operating my own company was exactly that — being able to operate my own company, being responsible for my own stuff, being my own boss ... and here, it’s a little bit different because I’m not in charge of [everything],” said North. “So that speaks to my nature of being a team player, and that is just as, if not more, rewarding [than] being your own boss sometimes. [Being] able to work in a team, where you all have shared goals and expectations, and being able to accomplish all this, [is what I find so rewarding in this job].”

Many challenges come with his current job, especially in maintaining both student freedom and safety at PHS.

“The challenge for us here is trying to foster the open campus [and] good learning environment that we enjoy here, [while also keeping everybody safe. Our learning environment] is so beneficial for the students and faculty members, but we [need to] achieve our goal of keeping everybody safe,” said North. “So we have to find a balance there.”