Panic buttons and classroom locks: How schools have strengthened security

When Adam Lane became principal of Haines City High School eight years ago, there was little chance of stopping an attacker from entering the high school, which sits next to orange groves, a cattle station and a cemetery in central Florida.

“You could get in your car and walk right into the office,” Lane says.

Currently the school is surrounded by a 3m fence and access to the enclosure is carefully controlled through special doors.

Visitors must press a buzzer to enter the main office.

More than 40 cameras monitor key areas.

New federal data released Thursday offers a glimpse into the many ways schools have tightened safety over the past five years, with the country recording three of the deadliest shootings on record and the other routine accidents with firearms in the schoolyard.

About two-thirds of public schools in the United States now control access to the school grounds — not just the building — during the school day, up from about half in the 2017-18 school year.

An estimated 43 percent of public schools have a “panic button” or silent alarm that connects directly to the police in an emergency, up from 29 percent five years ago.

And a stronger majority, 78%, equips the classrooms locks, versus 65 percent, according to survey data released by the National Center for Education Statistics, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

Demonstrating the extent to which safety is part of normal school life, nearly a third of public schools reported conducting evacuation drills nine or more times a year.

Some of the practices that have sparked more debate, but are less widespread, have also increased.

Casual use of metal detectors was recorded in 9% of public centres, while daily use was recorded in 6%.

And while many schools have police on campus, just 3 percent of public schools reported arming teachers or other non-security employees.

The data was collected in a survey conducted in November in more than 1,000 public centers.

Despite the fact that schools spend billions of dollars on safety, the number of gun incidents in schools has only increased.

The latest tragedy occurred last week Virginia, where police stated that a first year student, only 6 yearshe brought a gun from home and used it to seriously injure his teacher.

Last year, more than 330 people were killed or injured by gunfire on the school grounds, up from 218 in 2018, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a research project that tracks cases of shooting or brandishing a weapon on school property.

The total number of incidents — which can include instances in which no one was injured — also rose to more than 300, up from about 120 in 2018 and just 22 in 1999, the year of the high school shooting. Columbinewhen two teenagers killed 13 people.

The increase in gun violence in schools comes amid a broader increase in active shooter accidents and gun deaths in the United States.

In general, schools are still quite safe.

School shootings are “very very rare“says David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.

Its tracker identified 300 schools with gun incidents last year, a tiny fraction of the nearly 130,000 schools in the United States.

School shootings account for less than 1 percent of all gun deaths suffered by American children.

However, the growing number of victims has placed the responsibility on schools not only to educate, feed and counsel children, but also to protect them from harm.

Best practices include simple solutions like locking classroom doors and restricting access to schools.

But experts say many “deterrent” measures — such as metal detectors, transparent backpacks or the presence of armed personnel on campus — have not been shown to reliably prevent shootings.

Other tools, such as security cameras or panic buttons, can help stop the violence in the moment, but are unlikely to prevent shootings.

“There’s not a lot of evidence that it works,” says Marc Zimmerman, co-director of the National Center for School Safety at the University of Michigan, referring to many of the safety measures.

“If you pressno panic button, probably means that someone is already shooting or threatening to shoot. This is not prevention.”

Increased security can also come with its own risks. A recent study found that black students are four times more likely than other races to be enrolled in highly supervised schools, and students in those schools may pay a “security tax” on academic achievement and failure due to these measures. .

The most effective time to stop a school shooting, according to experts, is before a gun arrives on campus.

Because most school shootings are the work of current or recent students, their peers are often the best people to warn and report a threat, says Frank Straub, director of the National Policing Institute’s Center for Targeted Violence Prevention, who study shootings at avoided schools.

“Many of these people participate in what is called a leak:

They post it on the internet and tell a friend about it,” Straub explains.

He added that teachers, parents and others should also be looking for signs:

a child who becomes withdrawn and depressed, a student who draws weapons in a notebook.

“Basically, we need to do a better job of recognizing K-12 students who are struggling,” she said.

“And that’s expensive. It’s very difficult to prove what was prevented.”

However, most school shootings are not planned mass attacks.

“The most common thing — throughout history and the last couple of years, where there’s been a spectacular increase — is that there are fights that end in shootings,” explained Riedman, of the Database of Shootings in K-12 Schools (K-12 Schools). -12 school shooting databases).

Riedman highlighted the rise in shootings across the country, saying the data suggests there are more and more of them more people, even adults, who carry guns into schools.

Christi Barrett, superintendent of the Hemet Unified School District in Southern California, knows that whatever she does, she can’t completely eliminate the possibility of putting every one of the 22,000 students and thousands of employees in her vast district at risk. nearly 1,800 square kilometres.

But it has worked out to be proactive, starting several years ago with a closed-door policy in all classrooms.

The district is also in the midst of transitioning to the use of electronic locks, which it hopes will reduce any “human variables” or confusion with keys in the event of a crisis.

“If there’s an intruder, an active shooter, we have the ability to do that block everything instantly,” he said.

School authorities had also launched occasional random searches with metal detectors in some schools, with mixed results.

The devices sometimes detected innocuous objects, such as school bags, while failing to detect weapons when they weren’t in use.

And while she said the searches weren’t focused on any one group, she acknowledged there was a general concern about the disparate impact school policing can have on students of color.

“Even if it’s random, that perception can be there,” said Barrett, whose district is majority Hispanic, with smaller populations of black and white students.

A more universal system is now available to all secondary and high schools in the district, designed to specifically detect firearm metal.

“All the students go through it,” he said, adding that he hadn’t identified himself this year no gun.

To deal with students’ mental health, he said, there are counselors in all the centres.

And a computer program alerts when a student types keywords — like “suicide” or “shooting” — into district-provided devices to better identify children who need help.

He said the terrifying mass school shootings in recent years — in Parkland, Florida; Santa Fe, Texas; and Uvalde, Texas — haven’t pushed for safety improvements as much as they’ve reaffirmed them.

“It was more of a reinforcer of, ‘We’re not being careless,'” she said.

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