Delayed plans for single entrances leave schools open to intruders

School officials have known for years that it’s too easy for strangers to walk into buildings. Yet steps to restrict access still aren’t completed.

About a decade after design work was done, many Broward County schools still have multiple entrances that could make students vulnerable to intruders.

More than 50 schools are scheduled for upgrades to create one main entrance, but delays are causing a particular uproar in Coral Springs, where an officer at Coral Springs High thwarted a potential school shooting last year.

City officials call the lack of a single entrance a critical safety concern. They have asked the district to expedite plans for that school, as well as Taravella High, Sawgrass Springs Middle and Forest Glen Middle.

School district officials say the fixes are just a matter of time.

“It’s going to get done,” said School Board Chairwoman Abby Freedman. “It’s not like nobody’s working. You have individuals working around the clock.”

School safety came into the spotlight again this week when a gunman in northern California killed four people and wounded several others as he fired at an elementary school and apparently random strangers.

In Coral Springs, a former student walked onto campus in 2016 with a loaded 9mm handgun. Three students alerted staff; one of those students had seen the gun in the former student’s waistband.

That Oct. 10, an officer found the former student in the cafeteria and stopped him from giving the gun to another youth, who planned to do harm, police said.

The design for Coral Springs High School to have a single entrance is almost complete, and construction should begin in 2018, school district officials say. The project could be complete by summer 2019.

Jerry Graziose, the school district’s former director of school safety, said the district started retrofitting campuses with a single point of entry in the 1990s.

In some schools, that meant adding doors, fences or both. In other schools, classrooms in the front of the building were converted to reception areas to greet — or stop — outsiders.

The district had completed most elementary schools and some middle and high schools by the late 1990s. But the Great Recession hit while some schools were being renovated, and many plans were put on hold because of a lack of funds, said Linda Ferrara, the chair of the school district’s facilities task force since August of this year. She also was a member of the task force in 2008.

The remaining schools without a single point of entry became part of a $800 million bond referendum approved by voters in 2014.

The number at the time was 73 schools in need of change, which included Coral Springs High.

School officials said 18 of the schools later were “determined to already meet district standards,” leaving 55 schools — including Coral Springs High — still in various stages of design and reconstruction for upgraded security measures, school officials said.

Heery International, an architecture and program management firm, was hired in August 2015 to help manage construction projects. It has been working off designs done by the school district’s in-house staff that were completed a decade ago, Freedman said.

“So much has changed in technology from 10 years ago,” Freedman said. “When codes change you can’t use what you had before.”

The firm — which according to district records has been paid $11.6 million to date for its work countywide, including $709,000 for Coral Springs High — is bringing up designs to proper codes, she said.

Michael Bobby, the senior program director at Heery, declined to comment and referred calls to the school district.

Michele Kaufman, whose son is a senior at Coral Springs High, wants what voters — and parents — were promised from the 2014 referendum.

“But you should do it in the most economical and best design way possible,” Kaufman said.