USA TODAY International Edition
19 years after Columbine, schools are locked tightly
Security stronger, but not perfect
If you visit your typical public school these days, good luck getting in the doors without a keycard, pass or gatekeeper’s permission. The building will almost certainly be locked — and guarded.
Even if you’re buzzed in, chances are good you’ll be videotaped for at least part of your visit.
But two weeks after a rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., school security remains under an intense spotlight.
The year of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., just 19% of schools said they used security cameras to monitor buildings. By the 2013-14 school year, 75% had the devices up and running.
Two years later, when the federal government surveyed students, 83% said there were security cameras watching them at school.
Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), said one of the biggest changes is perhaps the simplest: a single entry point to school, with all others locked.
During school hours, Stoneman Douglas High School has a single entry point, Reuters reported last week. Visitors need to present IDs to enter the sprawling campus, but as dismissal time approaches, exterior gates are opened to allow students to leave, according to Jerry Graziose, the former head of school safety for the Broward County, Fla., school district.
That appears to be how the shooting suspect, 19-year-old former Stoneman Douglas student Nikolas Cruz, entered the campus without being stopped.
“At dismissal, unfortunately, you’ve got to open the gates to let everyone out,” Graziose told Reuters. “You’ve got 3,000 people.”
From 1999 to 2015, the percentage of students who said school doors were locked during class rose from 38% to 78%, though a slightly earlier survey of administrators found a full 93% who kept the doors locked each day.
By the 2013–14 school year, about 88% of public schools said they had a written plan for what to do in the event of a shooting — and about 70% had actually drilled students on using the plan, according to a 2017 report on school safety by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Seven in 10 students said security guards or police routinely patrolled the halls.
Canady said NASRO trains officers in nearly all 50 states, with a few key exceptions — among them Florida, where authorities and lawmakers have raised questions about the conduct of at least one sheriff’s deputy responding to the Parkland shooting spree.
Canady said he wasn’t even sure whether the deputies assigned to Stoneman Douglas were even considered SROs, which generally meet three criteria: They’re sworn, certified law enforcement officers with at least three years on the job. They must be trained in community-based policing, and the program must be a collaboration between the school district and a local law enforcement agency.
“This job is not for every law enforcement officer. In fact, it’s for a small portion of officers,” he said.
Even as many communities have pushed for bringing more police into schools, civil rights groups have maintained that cops in schools actually make them less safe for many children, increasing the likelihood that students will end up severely disciplined for minor infractions and in trouble with the law.
A 2015 viral video of a school police officer in South Carolina body-slamming a student still seated at a desk “underscores the problem with police in schools,” Advancement Project co-director Judith Browne Dianis said.
While many factors encompass safety — including rates of bullying, assaults and teacher perceptions of their own safety — NCES says the number of crimes against students has actually plummeted more than 80% since 1992. The rate of victimization for students in U.S. middle schools and high schools dropped from about 182 incidents per 1,000 students to just 30 in 2013.
And students feel safer at school: In the 20 years from 1995 to 2015, the percentage of students who reported being “afraid of attack or harm” at school dropped substantially, from 12% to 3%.
Civil rights groups say more cops in school often means more suspensions, which disproportionately affect minority students.
A 2015 study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that since 1972, suspension rates for white students rose from 3% to 5%. Meanwhile, suspension rates for African-American students nearly tripled, from 6% to 16%.
The NAACP has also questioned school discipline policies, saying enhanced police presence in schools “is not a panacea for preventing the violence” in shootings like the ones in Parkland and Newtown, Conn. “Instead,” the group said, “adding police and armed security to schools often means that normal student behavior becomes criminalized.”
“At dismissal, unfortunately, you’ve got to open the gates to let everyone out.” Jerry Graziose Former head of school safety, Broward County, Fla.