Yet Another School Shooting in Texas

[Ninurta]

Here is my perspective on school security from my personal experience.

I work at a local elementary and the doors require an electronic key fob. The front entrance and two parking area entrances use electronic locks that require the key fob. All other doors are locked from inside.

Once into the front vestibule you are in view of the main office with a locked door and the doors to the main hallway, also locked, both require a key fob. Once in the building there are fire doors that isolate each wing at their hallway entrance. Each classroom can be locked down by key and manually with a door stop plate. There is an extensive CCTV security system as well. I don't think anyone at the school monitors it, it may just record though their server.

All that security is great, except the teachers regularly leave side doors unlocked and windows open in classrooms. One of the front doors won't close and lock properly, so it is often unlocked. Also, the doors at the front are normally open during certain hours (indicated by a green light on the fob unit) with the inner hallway doors always unlocked now for some reason. The fire doors are never closed either, but are at the high school after school is out of session.

I know these things because part of my job is to perform a security check of the entire building on a daily basis. However, when I began doing that, it was with the idea of preventing vandalism and thievery. After awhile, I began to think about tactical issues like if I were stuck here or there, what could I do, etc. I know that building inside and out, I know it's strengths and weaknesses, how to hide, or to break in or break out as the case may be.

Now, esp. now, I look over my shoulder all the time. There has already been three incidences near the school this year, one of which I was unaware of happening during work (can't listen to or monitor news while working). There was a school lock down about 8 miles from my school just yesterday. It's a good strong rural community but more and more people are losing it, even out here.

The application of this school's current (and fairly decent) security measures are lax in my opinion. I don't think the teachers and staff gives much consideration to the security or does any routine checks. They may do a drill on occasion, I'm not sure, but based on what I've seen, it will be chaos if something really goes down.

As an example, the manual stop plates for the doors go into two holes in the cement floor in front of the inside of each room's doors to make it extremely had to break into the room when used. But there are three doors per room, and only one stop plate per room (a few have two) and many of the holes in the floors are packed with floor wax, crap and dirt to the point you can't get the stop plate to fit into the holes. That is the teacher's last line of defense and obviously not too many teachers ever tried to used the stop plate or have considered any of the defensive tactical aspects of their classroom.

All I can say is, if teachers and staff don't take this seriously, how can they rely on security measures that require their participation to work? It must be some kind of "it can't happen here" normalcy bias or "the security is good, not my problem" attitude.

That sounds a lot like how my high school was.  What do you think about having an armed guard at every school, who monitors some cameras to catch any incoming threats?  I think it would at least buy time for law enforcement to arrive, granted they actually do anything.  Best case, the guard eliminates the threat by themselves.

If you're going to put one on the cameras, you'll need another for a roving patrol so that any miscreants can't be certain of his location at any particular point in time. And further, I'd say that camera/roving duty should be swapped out between the two every 2 hours or so, because watching those cameras can lead to boredom and complacency, which in turn could lead to missing something the watcher should have seen.

I was a security shift supervisor for a CitiBank installation for a couple years. We had one guard at the entrance, one on the cameras, and a roving guard. The glaring flaw in their setup was that they never allowed for swapping out the camera guy nor gave him any relief other than two ten minute breaks per shift. he even had to eat his lunch watching the cameras, and that was bad juju. That was policy, and in my opinion a really bad one.

They had all the tech in the world - 36 cameras, retinal scanners for entry, the whole shebang, but none of the people skills in their policies to run the human element of the security properly. There's more to securing a facility than gadgets and stuffed shirts making bad policy.


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