From USA Today:
“This new high school in Michigan
was designed to thwart active shooters”
Curved hallways, protective
"wing walls," impact-resistant windows, doors that lock with a touch
of a smartphone. These are some of the
design elements Fruitport High School in western Michigan's Muskegon County
will implement in its new building, set to open summer 2021. Fruitport Community Schools Superintendent Bob
Szymoniak said the measures, which were supplemented by a $404,707 grant from
Michigan State Police, can potentially save lives in an active shooter
situation. "So often, we feel like
we’re going to be hapless victims – that there’s nothing that we can do until
after it (a shooting) happens," he said. "But what I’m learning is
there’s a lot we can do on the front end." Szymoniak said the idea to
design the new building with non-traditional safety measures came after a group
of parents in the community advocated for a new high school building to replace
the one built in the 1950s. It was agreed that a new facility will be built
around the old one, and to do this, the hallways had to be curved. "When we were sitting with the architect
during the design phase and were looking at this curved structure, somebody
said, 'You know, that cuts down on the line of sight of an active shooter.'
From that point, we started to brainstorm what else we could do to keep our
kids secure," said Szymoniak. In
hallways and classrooms are "wing walls" — concrete extensions that
will further reduce the line of sight of a shooter and act as a shield for
hiding students. Classroom windows that face hallways will be covered in
impact-resistant film. “If someone
wanted to get through that glass it would take them a while, and by the time
they were able to get through, law enforcement would be here to neutralize the
threat," said Szymoniak. The
building will also incorporate access control locks under control of school
officials. "The building is designed to be compartmentalized,"
Szymoniak said. "Fire doors (can) close in various locations, reducing an
active shooter's mobility in the building." Szymoniak said the district
made an effort to make the security design elements appear nonexistent. "We
did not want to remind students that this is here to keep you safe in the event
there’s an active shooter," he said. "If you walked into our school,
you would have no clue there were any of these security design elements
anywhere. We want our school to be warm, welcoming and just an awesome place
for students to learn.” Hillary Clinton took to Twitter to weigh in on the
matter, writing, "We're utterly failing kids as a society when we build
schools to accommodate shooters rather than students." Texas State
University Criminal Justice Professor Pete Blair, who researches active shooter
events, said schools across the nation are implementing similar design
elements. "These changes would make
it more difficult for a shooter to shoot long distances and would provide
students with more cover," Blair said. "The design elements
definitely have potential to reduce causality rates in the event of an active
shooter situation." He said it's important to protect students in the
nation's current environment and that it "makes sense to consider
potential threats" when designing new buildings. Because the environmental
changes are subtle, Blair said he doesn't anticipate the new design will be
frightening to students or that the threat of an active shooter will always be
on their minds. 'It’s either a dog or a child': Former Navy SEAL to critics of
training K-9s to attack school shooters "I’m happy to see schools trying
to increase the safety of their students starting with how buildings are
designed," Blair said. Szymoniak
said the feedback the district received from the public "has been very,
very positive." “I think that this is sending a message to communities and
school officials that they can take a more active role in ensuring that their
students are going to be safe...We can’t guarantee that it can never happen in
our building — as secure as we feel it is, it could. But what we’ve done is
everything that we could to minimize the harm that an active shooter could
do."
^ While it is a complete and
utter shame that this needs to be done in schools to make teachers and students
safer it is long over-due. School shootings have become widespread in the US
since the 1990s and nearly 30 years later school districts are just now
thinking about safety during a school shooting when building a new school. That
should have been done decades ago. At least this new school will be one more
added piece of security if anything should happen. ^
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