Fruitport, Michigan, will open a new high school designed to offer safe spaces in the event that an active shooter appears on campus.
It is quite a commentary on the state of our society.
The design of the new sections includes subtle safe spaces that can be used to protect students in the event of a shooting, and long curved hallways that would offer protection too.
“To cut down on the sight lines if we have an active shooter in the building,” Szymoniak said.
By reducing the sight lines anyone with malicious intent would be unable to see the entire length of the hallway.
Cement block bump outs are also placed in the curved hallways.
“To cut down on sight lines further, it also gives an opportunity for students to hide back behind and hopefully get help from within the classroom,” Szymoniak said.
Inside the classrooms students can hide in one corner that can’t be seen from the hallway. Access controlled locks on all of the doors in our school district give school leaders the ability to lock down the entire district with the push of one button. And impact resistant film will go on all classroom windows in the new high school.
Szymoniak says by adding layers of safety it will buy students, teachers and staff time and it will protect lives as police respond to the scene.
“These are going to be design elements that are just naturally part of buildings going into the future,” he said.
The new normal?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We have several schools in LAUSD that have been designed and built by companies that specialize in prison construction. Ironically, they have weird bump-outs and nooks and crannies of the type described.
But hey are terrible designs for secondary schools. They offer an endless number of hiding spots, where kids can get into all kinds of mischief…anywhere from making out, to having sex, to smoking to selling drugs.
Wonderful idea to minimize lines of sight…just wonderful.
I did not know that. Highly elucidating, thank you. Something must be done about the district hiring prison contractors to design schools. That is completely unacceptable.
Contreras High School and Bernstein High School off the top of my head. There are half a dozen others that have been built since those two.
Contreras even received an industry design award…for the contractor coming in significantly under budget. The construction was shoddy as hell and the contractor pocketed the difference; great award!
$*&#! đź‘Ž
STUPID IDEA! Schools should are designed for LEARNING. Another boondoggle for the Prison Industry.
School will become PRISONS, not places of learning and joy. DUH …
Is this the new normal?
What ever happened to a society based on common sense values and practices?
The leadership in this country…in politics, in business, and those making decisions with no moral or ethical compass has, in fact, failed. These people, driving the US either chase wealth or their own visions, and the American people suffer.
It’s time for the American people to take back the normalcy that those in power have thrown away. It’s time for our nation to reclaim good ideas over bad.
When children ask adults, “Why can’t we just protect ourselves from weapons that do not belong in our cities?”, the choice of building curved hallways with concrete walls is the dangerous choice.
Our children demonstrate greater knowledge, understanding, civility, and leadership, than those in power in politics and business.
Perhaps they should be listened to.
I know this school. Children that I love attend school in this district. And I want to think that promising ‘safety features’ is a trend that builds another desirable feature into school bond issues, luring more citizens to vote YES on a much-needed school update or expansion. As a citizen, I would have voted yes, in spite of the fact that I’m appalled at this way of approaching a bond election, and appalled that backpacks now come in a bulletproof variety.
But curved hallways and bumpouts? And places to hide in the classroom, when a shooter passes your door? They’re serious supervision problems. The people you want to see your children, at all times, are the teachers, aides, administrators and other adults. Every teacher knows about the one poorly designed stairwell or closet door where students collect to smoke, skip class or fight. Building those things in on purpose? Did they run the building design past the teachers? Probably not.
Thanks, Nancy.
Trump just backed away from his pledge to seek some sort of minimal gun control, after meeting with the head of the NRA. He promised the NRA that he would not seek legislation for universal background checks, which is the very least one could ask for. Neither of the shooters in Dayton or El Paso would have been stopped by a background check. Neither had a criminal record.
The killing will continue as long as the NRA owns the Republican Party.
My son attended a high school with a lot of these nooks and crannies. It was built 20 years, so it wasn’t built with school shooters in mind, but there are a LOT of places students can do nefarious things.
In a three week span, my son ran into two different pairs of students, in the hallways, having full-on sex in these hallways. The school didn’t have enough cameras or supervision to watch the students, and the students knew it.
We moved my son out of that school. I can see this kind of design to be a huge supervision problem. And that’s far more common than a mass shooting at a school.
There’s big money to made here. And, fear sells. Fear, fear, fear. Walls, bump outs, man traps…it goes on and on.
Sad.
And suppose the emergency is not a shooter, but some other event that requires rapid and thorough evacuation of the school? IN addition to the invitations for serious mischief by high school students, this design could be a nightmare for first responders, especially if there are electronic systems for the locks and they are unable to figure out where to concntrate their efforts.
Good points. Students may be left behind in one of the bump outs in an emergency. It sounds like a supervision nightmare.
There are 132,853 K-12 schools in the US–91,147 traditional public schools, 7,011 charter schools, and 34,576 private schools (2015-16 figures, NCES).
The cost of purchasing a high-quality metal detector is about 4K. So, having a metal detector for every school would cost $531,412,000.
According to the Brookings Institution, states spend $1.7 billion a year on contracts with testing companies for standardized tests (not including computers, practice tests, and test prep materials). So, if we eliminated the pedagogically USELESS standardized tests for a single year, this would more than pay for a metal detector for every school.
This is not a panacea, obviously. Kids would pile up outside the metal detector each morning and be targets. One would also have to add the cost of armed police, in the mornings, to protect those kids entering the buildings.
Do you actually think metal detectors in schools are good things?
Why not, Dienne?
Because (a) they turn schools into prisons. I think metal detectors are an invasion of privacy to begin with. Having them in schools just trains children at an early age to surrender that right (along with so many other invasions of children’s privacy).
and (b) they don’t work anyway. Even in airports, which have been doing the security thing for decades now, people still get through with guns, knives, you name it. While you are busily throwing away your nail clippers and knitting needles, the guy in line behind you has a rocket launcher down his pants (okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, but it’s no joke what people get through security with). It’s all theater to make us feel safer and (see point above) surrender our rights.
and (c) zero tolerance. Note the point about nail clippers and knitting needles. It’s already absurd how kids can’t bring a butter knife to spread frosting on a cake. With metal detectors, that just takes that to new heights.
Nobody asked me, but think it depends on the school. If I attended a school where there was a lot of bullying and violence, and where I knew students were bringing guns, knives, or other weapons into school, and I didn’t feel safe, then I would welcome metal detectors. If I attended a school that didn’t have much violence, where students weren’t known to bring weapons to school, and where I generally felt safe, I wouldn’t want metal detectors. My sense is that most schools do not need metal detectors.
If metal detectors don’t work, then that would change my reaction. But I not aware of the evidence that shows metal detectors don’t work.
I’d be curious if anyone has experience with a school that was known to be violent which installed metal detectors and what the result was? Did violence decrease? Were students generally happy or upset about the metal detectors?
Seems to me that metal detectors are a bandaid and an indirect “solution” to the problem of violence in schools. The problems have a lot more to do with poverty and trauma, and implementing greater “security” measures (which are often perceived as greater control measures) might make the problem worse. Granted, solving poverty and trauma is a tall order and isn’t going to happen overnight, so, yes, you do need to attend to immediate safety. But my experience is that the more you try to restrict people, the more they just try to work around the restrictions and it undermines relationships in the process.
I’d be curious if anyone has a different experience.
Good questions above, and not surprisingly I don’t know the answers. A rich set data would be even more interesting, but I suspect it’s difficult to come by such data.
A few random add-on thoughts:
The “illusion of safety” may not necessarily be a bad thing or even a wash. Arguably, if people feel like they’re in a safe environment because metal detectors are weeding out weapons (even if they aren’t successfully weeding out weapons), they will be less likely to feel the need to carry weapons to protect themselves. Conversely, if you’re in a violent environment, and you have real reasons to fear that adversaries may be carrying weapons, you might be more likely to want something to defend yourself.
If we were to find that the number of weapons identified and seized as a result of metal detectors was very low relative to the number of scans, we might conclude the scans weren’t effective (because weapons were slipping past the screens) or the scans weren’t necessary (because students must have been bringing many weapons to school). But we also might conclude that metal detectors have a deterrent effect, and that students who have to pass through metal detectors are much less likely to bring weapons to school.
I do know a fair number of guns and knives are seized at schools in NYC that use metal detectors. But I would presume the seizure rate (i.e. weapons seized relative to total number of scans) is extremely low. But it’s not clear to me how that rate should be interpreted, per my second bullet above.
To me, metal detectors don’t seem like a very effective response to mass shootings. If they have any role, it seems to me that role is in reacting to situations at specific schools with high rates of violence/weapons.
Wow, I had bullet points and they all disappeared and left a wall of text. WordPress, I hate you.
No one knows or can predict which school is going to be targeted by some insane shooter. Sandy Hook Elementary was not a school in which violence was commonplace or expected. Better metal detectors than dead kids. One dead kid is one too many. Keep guns from coming into schools, and you keep kids from being killed, in schools, by guns. We accept having metal detectors at airports and courthouses, why not at schools?
Metal detectors would not have saved the children of Sandy Hook elementary school.
The killer came to the glass door, which was locked for security, and blasted through the door. He then proceeded to kill everyone he encountered. The school may have had a metal detector but he would have shot it to bits.
Good point, Diane. I mentioned above that metal detectors are not a panacea. But they could deter some of this violence. My point about Sandy Hook (and Columbine and Parkman, and many other places where these shootings have occurred) is that they were not particularly violence-prone places. It does seem that one of these incidents could happen most anywhere. And clearly, the major issue we need to address to lessen the carnage is the guns–not school design, video games, or mental illness. I suspect that we are in agreement on that.
If you look down a list of schools where shootings have occurred in the last few years, these are not typically schools that are violence ridden on a daily basis. This seems to happen pretty much at random, in communities of all kinds.
And it is not the case that detectors in airports provide simply an “illusion of security,” though, certainly, airport security systems are thwarted all the time. In 2018, according to CBS News, 4,239 guns were found at TSA airport checkpoints. 86 percent of them were loaded. That’s 4,239 guns that did not go aboard airplanes.
There is a cost-benefit analysis to be made. How much safer do metal detectors make schools? How much do they cost? Do they have adverse effects? The research is not yet clear, but there is no clear evidence that metal detectors improve the situation and some indication that they make things worse: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49744186_Impacts_of_Metal_Detector_Use_in_Schools_Insights_From_15_Years_of_Research
If we’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars (which could be spent elsewhere), and infringe on students’ rights to privacy, I think it’s incumbent upon people who want metal detectors to demonstrate their efficacy, not just say that some shootings could theoretically be prevented by metal detectors. Metal detectors may, in fact, simply up the ante, as Diane notes about the Sandy Hook shooter simply blowing through the glass.
Most schools are open campuses sitting on several acres with multiple buildings. Metal detectors will not detect a weapon someone slipped through, over, or under the perimeter fence if there is a perimeter fence.
Then all a deranged killer has to do is pass through the metal detector before he retrieves his weapon hidden somewhere just inside the perimeter fence if there is a perimeter fence.
But why bother, just climb over the fence and skip the metal detector.
After the first few failures of the metal detectors and a few dozen more dead children, Trump, the GOP, and the NRA will want bunkers, concertina wire, and watchtowers running along the perimeter of all public schools with the only easy and safe way in through the metal detectors/.
After that fails, they will install minefields between two fences along each school perimeter so if any deranged killer climbs over the first fence, he will blow up before reaching the second fence, maybe, because it’s easy to buy metal detectors and there are easy to build/buy explosives detectors so the deranged killers will be able to avoid stepping on those land mines.
I am with D77 on this question. Ultimately, we have to trust society. If we have lost the ability to trust, nothing is left. If we have lost the ability to risk, nothin is left. We have to give students the chance to do good things without being watched, or they will never learn to do things of their own cognition.
Bob, this makes perfect sense.
Which is why it will never come to fruition.
I have just finished reading Parkland by David Cullen (he also wrote Columbine, but that was more about what happened; because the MSD survivors became activists–because adults weren’t doing it for them–Cullen writes about the student activism. One (David Hogg, I believe–you’ve all seen him on tv) made price tags reading “$1.05.”
This is the price of the lives of each student in FL as compared to how much $$$ Marco Rubio had received in campaign contributions from the NRA.
$1.05
We need to outlaw semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines; outlaw gun shows and private gun sales; institute buy-back programs; institute rewards for information leading to the arrest of someone who violates these laws; require that guns be kept in smart safes subject to random, routine inspection; and install metal detectors in schools. Again, there is no predicting what school an incident will occur at based on levels of violence (bullying, etc) there, and if there are no guns in a school, there will be no kids killed, in the school, by a gun. These steps will not eliminate shootings, but they will go a long way toward that goal.
My above comment was supposed to be a reply to your 4:11 PM idea, Bob, about replacing “standardized” tests (millions of dollars spent) w/metal detectors, spending $$$ on those, instead.
I got that, retired! Thank you.
Retired, do you recommend the Parkland book by Cullen?
We have a new school this fall. It is very nice and well designed by a local architect. Still, whereas the chances for a person to get into school ae fewer due to the design, the places where students can exit to escape to the outside are fewer as well. We cannot escape if our wing is attacked. In the old school, we could just go out the door if we had to.It is sad to have to even consider this.
Reducing sight lines in a school doesn’t seem to me a great idea. One of the guidelines for running a school is that kids should be out of sight of a supervising adult as little as possible. Reducing sight lines would make it far easier for negative incidents (passing drugs or weapons, bullying) to occur.
It is certainly true that reducing sight lines will make it more difficult for the wardens to supervise the inmates. This is not lost on the students. My youngest would often point out that the architect of his high school typically designed prisons. It colored his understanding of the goal of public education.
It is simply irresponsible for schools to leave students unsupervised. This places them at risk.
And, in fact, if a school does leave students unsupervised and an incident occurs that causes harm to a student, then the school will be legally liable if supervision could have prevented the injury.
Think like a greedy corporate education vampire and you will soon realize that all those hard to see areas in schools built like prisons/fortresses will end up with expensive surveillance camera systems with a need to hire more high-paid administrative positions where friends and relatives of that vampire reformers will get to sit around in underground bunkers monitoring all the cameras when school is in session.
Knock on wood and pray that after Trump is out of the White House and ends up a pauper in prison, his children will manage to be hired into some of those six-figure educational admisntrative surveillance jobs so they won’t lost their lifestyles.
In my most recent school, cameras covered most of the school outside of classrooms, but no one monitored them routinely.
In general, the law says that teachers have no expectation of privacy in classrooms. However, individual states and districts may restrict what sort of recording can be done. Twelve US states (of which Florida is one) have wiretapping laws that require consent of all parties for a recording to be done. The rest have one party consent laws, meaning that one person can do the recording. However, the law here is complex. About 75 percent of schools in the US have surveillance cameras in the common spaces outside classrooms. Some recent federal court decisions have come down against parents’ desire to do recording in classrooms for the benefit of students with special needs who might want to replay those recordings and study them later on. My advice: talk to a lawyer about what the regs are in your state.
Each & every student in the U.S. MUST buy a bulletproof backpack!
(Of course, I am being sarcastic.)
Perhaps, though, school supply lists should include Kevlar vests & heavy metal helmets.
Oh, wait…we don’t even equip our combat soldiers w/Kevlar. (They’ve had to purchase their own.)
I propose one of those automatic, oscillating machine guns in every school like Walter White used in the last episode of Breaking Bad.
The gun could pop up when the principal pushed a button.
Students could be trained to hit the floor when the alarm sounded leaving only the shooter vulnerable.
I wonder how many people will think you are serious about this. With regard to my suggestion about metal detectors, above, I almost always on the side of less surveillance. But I am heartbroken by the carnage caused by guns in our schools and elsewhere, and it seems to me that we should be able to design acceptable ways of ensuring that guns don’t get inside schools.
It worked in Breaking Bad .
And Myth Busters tested it and called it ” plausible.”
What could possibly go wrong?
Exactly what I think when some person of questionable analytical ability (Trump, Florida legislators and governor) suggests arming teachers. Gee. What could possibly go wrong? PA Announcement: Yearbooks are now available for pickup at the school bookstore, and any student who finds Mr. Schimizzi’s Glock, please turn it in to the Main Office. Thank you, and Go, Cougars!
Only leaders that are totally insane and irrational would allow our children to grow up in a world like this.
Thank you, Trumplican Party, the Party of Profit for the few over the quality of life for the many.
I was reading today about kids who are having active shooter drills on their first day of school. What a memory to have of such a joyous, momentous occasion in a life!!!!
Yes, thanks McConnell, Trump, Ryan, and all the others who have brought this upon us.
Back in the 1990s, the high school where I taught started having active shooter drills, fire drills, and bomb dress (if someone called the school or police and said there was a bomb in one of the lockers or classrooms). The schools installed solid,metal-clad doors that could not be kept unlocked. The key only allowed you to open the door but not unlock it. Once the doors were closed, they could be opened from the inside without a key but only with a key from the outside.
One stat that keeps coming back to me, that I just can’t get out of my mind, is that it took only 32 SECONDS for the Dayton, Ohio, shooter to kill 9 people and wound 27 others. 32 SECONDS!!!
People shouldn’t be allowed to possess weapons that can do that, and those that people already have need to be taken from them, by force, if necessary.
Extraordinarily moving: https://www.facebook.com/NowThisPolitics/videos/2240141449429759/?v=2240141449429759
Trump to reporters today: “I am the chosen one.”
Time to get this guy some meds.
Trump has repeatedly heard or read tweets that he is “the chosen one” from so many of his walking-dead followers, he believes it, too.
It’s always interesting when this concept comes up in the political sphere. Jacques Chirac reported in his autobiography a telephone conversation with George Bush, Jr., in which the latter described the Iraqi conflict as a working out of events foretold in Revelations–making George, ofc, a chosen player in this prophesied drama. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/aug/10/religion-george-bush
Meds don’t treat personality.
Personality is a problem. Psychiatric disorders may respond to meds. A doctor on Twitter this morning said that if anyone checked in to his hospital claiming to be the King of Israel and the Chosen One, the staff would assume he was high on drugs or order a psychiatric evaluation at once
It was a joke, Dienne, because this sounds like psychosis. But on the matter of personality disorders, here’s what the Mayo Clinic says:
here are no medications specifically approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat personality disorders. However, several types of psychiatric medications may help with various personality disorder symptoms.
Sorry, I just read your question about the David Cullen book, Parkland &, yes, I do recommend reading it (& his Columbine, as well). Parkland, especially, gives one insight into the MSD students’ emotions & actions taken. Just as the students who visited Dianne Feinstein & asked for action on climate change, & were treated rudely, more students started Sunrise, which has demanded a Green New Deal, going to the CA Dem Convention, & obtaining most candidates’ signatures (not Hickenlooper, no longer in the race, of course; Biden* didn’t bother showing up) that they would not accept campaign donations from the fuel/oil corporations/industry.
Both groups (students from MSD who started the national movement March for our Lives, & those who started Sunrise did so because the adults are NOT being adults, i.e., protecting their children, changing laws. So, they are being the adults, in order to save themselves & their children (& MFOL & Sunrise members consistently mention that they are doing this for their children & future generations.
He will not beat IQ45; as I’ve said before, here, on a shared debate stage, he will become the Jeb! of 2020.T will absolutely rip him to shreds, & it will be too late. I don’t care about his speech (after El Paso & Dayton) that was earlier highly praised in a post, here. Even IQ45 can give a good speech (when someone else writes it for him & he reads it); most politicians–if not all–can orate well. But if one cannot think on his feet, perform well even amongst peers (when asked about health care, he partially raised his hand–& then only his finger, & his arm went up & down; Kamala Harris took him to task; he was the only candidate on all 4 nights to cut himself off
{he said, “I guess my time is up,” [which it wasn’t!] when he couldn’t think of anything else to say} & then he made those inappropriate comments about education). Aside from the fact that he was, by way of saying NOTHING about Obama/Duncan ed. policies, he was (& probably still is) a DFER. And, being the 5th out of 20+ candidates taking the most billionaire money (from *Forbes article posted here a few days ago), that makes him a DINO, as well.
Having aired all of that (whew!), can you, Diane, or someone from MA get Nancy Carlsson-Paige to talk to Warren/the Warren Campaign? I know you tried to get to her, Diane, but N.C.-P., being a MA resident & at Lesley College & an active educator there may get to her (or even her son, Matt Damon!). I really hate it when people around the candidate (obviously, Bernie has some great ones this time around) are so thick (telling you they’re “on a roll”–?!) that they really hurt their own candidate.
I, too, am extremely worried that a Biden candidacy might self destruct. Trump is probably praying to his god Mammon that Biden will be anointed. A second term for Trump is unimaginable.
It’s too bad that Warren and Sanders are splitting the progressive vote. If only one were running, he or she would be far ahead of the pack.
Clearly the case. I think that people are in the mood for a true progressive and that the Dems are making an enormous mistake by taking the position that only a so-called “moderate” can, in these circumstances, win. We need someone who will bring out the substantial numbers of reluctant Democratic voters, as Obama did.
I have a direct line to the Warren campaign staff. They are not interested in talking about K-12 education now.
Well, they are in the funding stage. Alas.
I do not know the specific architectural design of this school. I have no problem, in principle, with designing schools “smart”. Florida schools are designed to withstand hurricane damage. California schools must meet earthquake codes.
Although the chance of a school having a crazed maniac shooting the place up, is very small statistically, utilizing design tools to minimize casualties, and helping to protect students makes a great deal of sense.
Since, we cannot depend on any serious efforts to have meaningful firearms legislation (that will lead to a reduction in mass shootings), school designers will have to do what they can.
It seems to me, that having additional video cameras, and uniformed and plain-clothes security personnel in public schools is a smart move. This has the added benefit of deterring other crimes like theft, vandalism, drug dealing, bullying, etc.
No one wants to turn schools into prisons, with “big brother” watching every move.
No one things that an airport is a prison because it has metal detectors. Annoying, yes, but not prisonlike. I repeat my early observation: Metal detectors have been shown (in airports) to identify guns and prevent them from getting onto planes. It’s not common (thank God), but it’s common enough (2,700 incidents of guns found in airport screening last year). If fewer guns get into schools, fewer kids will be killed by guns.
“No one things that an airport is a prison because it has metal detectors.”
Well, maybe not just because of the metal detectors, but where besides airports and jails/prisons are you subjected to invasive pat-downs, naked body scans and even full-on strip/body cavity searches? Granted, people “voluntarily” enter an airport more so than a jail, but if you need/want to get anywhere, airline travel is often a necessity, especially for a lot of business people. Restricting travel is totalitarian.
Courts. Many federal and state buildings.
So you would be OK, Dienne, with doing away with airport screenings and having had those 2,700 guns, 86 percent of which were loaded, go onto planes last year? That seems a high price to pay.
cx to my post: thinks, lol
“The new normal.” That’s a sad statement for schools. I put a mirror up in my classroom the other day and then the custodian and I stood in the hallway actively trying to determine where students should go in a lockdown in order to not be seen from the hallway by someone using or not using the mirror! We determined the mirror could stay and best option for sheltering out of sight in the room.
Diane, you are so right in your assessment of Warren & Sanders–they must decide that only one of them will run for president, w/the other as v.p. (& they can announce that early, which would bring them even more votes. It looks like Gabbard will be out in the near future, & she will shift over her %ages to one of them.
Also–& I think I’d written this in a later post–perhaps Nancy Carlsson-Paige (sp.-? name twisted round?) & her son, Matt Damon, Bostonians that they are (well, Mom is still in MA, teacher at Lesley College, according to my last Wikipedia info.) could get through to Warren campaign, esp. Nancy being a teacher, which Warren was. (There’s an excellent article on her–on that angle–in the latest New York magazine {August 5-22nd, I believe–noneother than Ivanka Trump is the cover story, & it’s a very unflattering one}.)