Alleviating Stress, Building Confidence, and Creating Safer Schools Through Empowerment

• By Mark Berger, Guy Grace
• September 05, 2024

An active shooter situation is often cited as being extremely rare among school violence incidents in our country. Nevertheless, when one occurs, it’s always devastating, often unpredictable, and evolves quickly. Whether at a school, a house of worship, or anywhere for that matter, one is still too many.

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) states, “Amid the chaos, anyone can play an integral role in mitigating the impacts of an active shooter incident.” CISA goes on to say that because these events are often over within 10 to 15 minutes and sometimes before law enforcement arrives on the scene, it’s critical that individuals be prepared both mentally and physically to deal with such scenarios.

That may seem like a daunting expectation at first glance, especially in K-12 settings. However, educating students and staff about steps they can take and technologies that are in place to protect their safety is proving to be empowering, reassuring, and ultimately a stress reliever.

It’s All About Life Safety
As we often share, stress is a wall between students and absorbing information – a barrier to learning. Establishing and maintaining a unified life safety system that involves the active participation of students and staff helps alleviate that stress. It instills a greater sense of control, responsibility, and well-being. And it demonstrates that a district is fully committed to creating an environment for success.

Of course, unified life safety programs extend well beyond active shooter events. They’re also about empowering people with the information and skills to respond effectively to situations like tornadoes, medical emergencies, and other threats, including potential attacks from wild animals, which occasionally happen in some parts of the country.

Districts need to take an all-hazards approach to life safety. This requires conducting regular and consistent risk assessments to understand and address emerging concerns. Such an assessment revealed that a proposed detox center was going to be located three blocks from a school, opening the potential for threatening encounters with those struggling with drug addiction and possibly even drug dealers targeting the area.

To assist with performing these evaluations, many states have set up an Office of School Safety or are in the process of doing so, staffing them with security specialists who travel to various districts to facilitate assessments and provide consultative advice. Such progress provides more districts with the tools and paths forward to develop the most appropriate protocols and to make the best security technology decisions for their school campuses.

This has been particularly helpful to school districts that may not have a dedicated security director, which is often the case in rural areas but is also applicable in many suburban and urban settings. The increase in funding and personnel to create these centers is a very positive step toward advancing awareness and implementing and strengthening life safety programs across the U.S.

After all, schools are about empowering students to learn to the best of their ability. Not just academics but also social and life skills, to better prepare them for what’s ahead so they understand how to interact, react, and think on their feet appropriately.

Empowerment Starts at the Classroom Door
Older classroom locksets and even newer quick-fix barricades can impede safety by making it difficult for people to unlock a door quickly, remove a barrier, and evacuate or escape when necessary. Likewise, verifying whether a classroom door is locked when in session has also created vulnerabilities.

Outmoded locks still in some schools require teachers to open the door, step into the hall, use a key to check and/or secure the lock, and then re-enter the classroom, closing the door behind them. This leaves the teacher and classroom exposed.

It doesn’t take much to imagine the disastrous outcome that could ensue under these circumstances if a dangerous incident arose and a teacher had no way to lock a door from inside, didn’t have the key, or didn’t know the protocol. Sadly, loss of life has occurred in the past because of these shortcomings. The tragic events at Sandy Hook are what drove our team to design locksets around the mantra “Anyone, anytime, in any classroom, should be able to secure the door.”

Along with academic and athletic achievements, social growth, and other successful accomplishments, schools offer students a chance to demonstrate leadership. There are also opportunities to empower them with safety measure responsibilities based on age-appropriate, grade-level criteria. That empowerment starts at the classroom door.

Fortunately, many classrooms today have been retrofitted with code-compliant locksets that can be activated from the inside with either a push button or a thumb turn lever. Some feature an obvious big red button, so kids know immediately where it is and what to do.

Talk to them about how a safe place has been created in the classroom and where they’re supposed to go if they feel something is threatening. Let them know that whoever is closest to the door during an incident should push that button.

Emphasize that they can always exit the classroom just by pulling down the lever, whether or not the red button is pressed. Teach them these protocols on the first day of school and continue to reinforce them with a refresher after holidays and other breaks.

Many locks now feature status indicators with large convex displays that are visible from any angle to clearly show whether a door is secured. If a student or teacher notices that it isn’t locked, they can act on it with that instant button push or flip of a thumb turn.

While some schools have adopted a practice of always locking classrooms when occupied, that’s not usually realistic, given the many activities and busy schedules during the school day that can cause fleeting distractions. So, being able to double-check a door’s security status quickly or assign a student to assist with that precaution is extremely valuable.

Something as simple as empowering students to lock a classroom door from the inside brings them peace of mind. There have been situations where, if the kids had not been able to lock classroom doors, there could have been more casualties in the school. When you educate students about how important a door lock can be, you also reduce the possibility of them irresponsibly using it to pull a prank because they understand it’s a lifesaving tool in case the worst should ever unfold at their school.

Age-Appropriate Training
K-3 students are closely supervised and in one classroom most of the day. Since there’s little coming and going, it’s easier to stay on top of keeping the door locked. At higher grade levels, kids start transitioning between rooms for different subjects, so there’s more passing period activity in corridors, meaning more doors are temporarily left unlocked, and more vigilance is necessary to make sure classrooms are re-secured once the bell rings.

When all is said and done, it’s interesting how logical, simple, and strong a first line of defense doors and door hardware are. Not only are they critical during class every day but also in emergency shelter-in-place and evasion scenarios. Having students play a key role in such a simple solution is powerful.

Additional Empowerment Opportunities
Empowerment can also be enhanced by newer technologies like wearable duress buttons issued to staff members who can activate them when there’s a threat. These buttons can also serve as a locator to identify where people are or where an emergency may be underway.

Classrooms with electronic access control (EAC) locks and card readers at the door feature devices that include a built-in duress button that can be pushed to send an alert and simultaneously automatically lock the door if that’s an age-appropriate safety option for that room. EAC can also be helpful for issuing temporary hall pass card credentials to students, allowing them to exit and return with minimum disruption to the class.

Many students have Chromebooks or other eLearning devices that have been unified with such solutions as E-Hallpass. A self-serve restroom or hall pass tab on their display simply lets the teacher know they need a temporary card. Integrated with a school’s video management system, this feature also helps staff keep track of someone passing through a corridor.

One of the major advancements in integrated access control, video management, as well as other unified life safety digital components today enable more systems to be built on open architecture platforms. This provides extended interoperability among various manufacturers’ software and hardware solutions, greater resilience, easier updating to maintain cybersecurity and performance, and longer life cycles to enhance sustainability. In other words, a more worthwhile investment in life safety.

We often say that if technology is the force multiplier for school safety, people are the force – the eyes and ears that often catch something that’s amiss and sound the alarm. It’s all about people in schools – faculty, staff, and students alike.

That empowered force also includes the many concerned and involved parents, compassionate administrators, dedicated school board members, and communities at large that step up to support continued improvements through bond measures and fundraisers that provide near-term and long-term benefits.

If a door gets locked too hastily while the teacher is briefly out of the room, no one should be punished for it. Somebody can always enter with a key or, in the case of an electronic access-controlled door, a card or mobile credential. Students should understand that even though the door is locked, they can still get out if necessary or instructed to do so since life safety codes require locks that provide single-motion free egress.

Discussion and learning about these basic but vital classroom locking procedures need to be included and reviewed as part of safety drills, whether they’re fire drills or about lockdown, tornado, or other emergency protocols. Conducting drills is part of building awareness and preparedness, but they should also be announced beforehand so they don’t cause undue stress and distract kids from absorbing important information.

This article originally appeared in the September / October 2024 issue of Campus Security Today.