Does anyone really want to stop school shootings? I ask because when there is a school shooting, even before the bodies have cooled, a legion of activists demand that guns are taken away from responsible gun owners.
Watch the security footage of the Nashville shooter. Why do the front doors have full-length glass panels? Adjacent to the front doors, are full-length glass panels. Those provide no barrier to entry. You see that adjacent to the office doors, there are small panels. That makes sense and is as attractive. What happened to the wire-embedded glass that was in doors back in the day?
At North Royalton, we recently opened a new wing at the high school. The rest of the building underwent a substantial renovation. Teachers had several meetings with architects as the renovation was planned. Central Office tried to accommodate our requests.
Central Office or the architects did not look to our comments to validate their decisions. The design was big on glass panels. Some were changed, but for the most part, classrooms have a full-length glass panel adjacent to every door. From a security standpoint, that is unsupportable. It doesn’t make any sense.
The walls in the new wing are drywall. The old building is concrete block and poured concrete. That can be made to look attractive, but is more expensive to build. It’s possible to kick through drywall to gain entrance and drywall doesn’t stop a bullet.
If administrators and government officials were actually interested in reducing casualties from school shootings, all classroom doors would have windows with embedded wire mesh and all glass panels would be small enough to be difficult to crawl through. Walls would be substantial enough to provide some security.
Nobody asks administrators or government officials why schools are built to be so welcoming to school shooters. I suspect the people in authority are engaging in a type of magical thinking. If it doesn’t look like we are worried about violence, nobody will think about being violent. Have high expectations, and everyone will rise to meet them.
