Entering School Zone

Aug 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Fickes

Students today usually share their schools with the people that pay for schools — residents of the surrounding communities. But, do shared school facilities raise issues about security?

According to educators and security experts, shared facilities can help and hurt security. More people using school facilities means more eyes watching and less chance that vandals or other criminals could work unobserved. On the other hand, when more people use school buildings, there's always the chance someone with malicious intent is among the crowd.

“I would never advise people not to share facilities because of security issues,” says Michael Dorn, CEO of Safe Havens International, a non-profit school safety center that consults with schools and government agencies on security and safety issues. “While shared facilities do require more creative design when it comes to security, the security problems are similar to those in facilities that are not shared.”

According to Dorn and other experts, school security — for shared as well as unshared facilities — begins with design, requires uncompromising supervision and benefits from the wise use of technology.

School building designs that share and secure

Over the past 10 years, virtually every high school as well as some middle schools and elementary schools designed by King Scott Associates Inc., Kalamazoo, Mich., have featured shared spaces, company architects say.

School officials conceive of new facilities as shared spaces as a means of developing community support for the bond issues needed to raise funds to build new schools. Shared spaces might include gymnasiums, weight rooms, locker rooms, swimming pools, cafeterias, auditoriums and, in some cases, areas of classroom wings.

At the same time, community groups around the country have grown more and more interested in using school spaces, even to the point of paying rent to use spaces such as the cafeteria or the theater for group functions.

Hartland Consolidated Schools in Hartland, Mich., for example, raised funds for a new high school on the promise of sharing a swimming pool with the community. The new Hartland High School, designed by King Scott, has two swimming pools — a competition pool used primarily by students and an activity pool used by the community as well as students. The activity pool has been a hit with the community, which uses the facility 80 percent of the time, according to school officials.

Hartland's community pool dictated a number of special design features for the school, among them separate entrances for community members and students.

To enter the pool, community members must show identification — if they are not known to the attendant — and sign in at a gated station. The corridor leading from the check-in station to the community and family locker rooms is separated from the academic side of the building — where the students are — by security doors.

Keeping community swimmers separate from students also requires separate locker rooms. At Hartland, King Scott designed an athletic locker room for students, a community locker room for individual community members and family locker rooms with individual changing areas.

Students enter their locker rooms through a different corridor than the one used by community members. Students also enter the pool through a separate corridor. Attendants and lifeguards supervising the pool watch to make sure community members do not wander into the corridor leading to the student locker rooms and the academic side of the building.

“Given issues of school violence, the design goal was to prevent student and community populations from mingling in corridors or locker rooms,” says Sarah Haselschwardt, AIA, senior design architect with King Scott. “It was important to reassure parents that their children are not going to run into someone inappropriate during the school day. There are also modesty issues related to locker rooms and different age groups.”

More generally, Haselschwardt continues, designs for shared elementary, middle, and high schools typically provide separate entrances for students and community members. Media centers, gymnasiums, cafeterias and other areas used by students and community members are located in common areas of the structure, often near main entrances. “We work hard to close off classroom wings to the community,” she says. “We have to think about security in relation to weekend and evening use by the community. Sometimes we have to work out designs that facilitate community uses during the school day when students may not be using a piece of the school.”

According to Dorn, designers must also take care to design schools with unobstructed sight lines and no blind spots. “I've seen school designs where brick walls create blind spots where you could have a sexual assault,” he says. “You can often eliminate blind spots by thinking about alternative materials. For example, a designer might replace a brick wall that cuts off sight lines with a railing that provides a barrier but allows an unobstructed view.”

Watching and access control

“The most important access control technique that a school can use is supervision,” Dorn continues. “Whether a school facility is being shared with the community or not, you should never let a person into the building without checking identification and issuing a visible visitor's badge. If you don't do that, and there is any breach in the physical security of the building — if someone props a door open — then an outsider can come into your building and leave with a child.

“I'm not suggesting that people are snatching kids from schools left and right, but it does happen,” Dorn says. “And when it happens, the consequences can be awful.”

Dorn often dramatizes his point about visitor supervision to school administrators with a stunt. Sonayia Shepherd, a Safe Havens analyst, frequently tests supervisory capabilities by walking into schools and walking out with children. School faculty or administrators rarely question her. In fact, Shepherd has entered schools across the country and managed to lure children into leaving with her 80 percent of the time, Dorn says, noting that these stunts are always carried out with the permission of superintendents.

In one case, school officials failed to strengthen their visitor procedures after one of Dorn's mock abductions. Two years later, an outsider with a history of emotional illness entered one of that district's elementary schools and beat a student, leaving her with permanent brain damage. “The district is being sued,” Dorn says. “In my estimation, they are going to lose.”

“Visitor badges are the key to supervision,” Dorn continues. “You have to be able to see at a glance whether or not someone belongs in your school. And you have to make sure that people in the school are watching for people without badges and questioning them.”

Security technology for schools

Hartland High School backs up security design and supervision with technology.

The academic wings of the school are studded with motion detectors and door contact alarms. “We have four different alarm zones in the building,” says Hartland's principal Chuck Hughes. “When a group is using a room on one area of the building, we de-activate the alarms in that zone, and activate alarms in the unused zones. If someone goes into an alarmed area, we can call up video from our CCTV system.”

The school has installed 42 Pelco cameras and a Pelco 8000 digital video recorder (DVR) enabled for use over the Web. The cameras monitor all areas of the school including the shared swimming pools. “We selected this kind of DVR because this is a shared facility,” says Paul Twigg, director of educational technology with Barton Malow Company, the construction manager for the project. “Since the facility would be used at night and on weekends, we thought it was important for the administrators to be able to manage the building remotely. Using the camera system with a laptop or other computer at home is part of that.”

Hartland has also secured several of its exterior doors with a basic access control system, primarily to enable the custodial and administrative staffs and the faculty to enter the building after hours and on weekends.

Dorn agrees that technology can boost security in schools with and without shared facilities but cautions administrators against relying solely on technology. “Metal detectors, security cameras and access control technology can be extremely powerful and effective security tools, but only if you use these tools correctly,” Dorn says. “Most schools don't. They rely too much on technology. If you don't supervise visitors and students, you can't expect security technology to help.”

Dorn makes this point by signing in as a visitor at schools around the country using the name of serial killer Ted Bundy. “I've only been stopped and questioned about that name one time,” he says.

Once, Dorn signed into a main school district building, walked through a metal detector, appeared for a meeting in the superintendent's office, opened his brief case, and deposited four guns on her desk. “On previous visits, I noticed that they weren't checking hand carry bags with metal detection,” he says. “You could put anything you wanted in a bag or case and bring it into the building. Anyone can spot that kind of weakness. The technology solutions available today are phenomenal. But if you don't use the technology right, it won't help you.”

In monitoring its shared facilities, Hartland High School uses technology but relies on human eyes and ears. “Security is always top-of-mind, and we think about it all the time in school,” says Steve Assenmacher, who retired in June from his post as Hartland's director of community education. “Is security more of an issue when a school building is shared with the public? I suspect it becomes a bit more of an issue, but it's difficult to quantify. Our experience is that the more community use we have, the less vandalism we've seen. Kids will vandalize facilities. But when adults are around, we don't see much vandalism. I think that having lots of people in the school also makes it more difficult for someone to try and take a kid. Someone will see it.

“Then again, if an individual is going to bring a weapon into the school, how do you secure against that,” Assenmacher asks. “You could put metal detectors at the doors, but our community would not accept that.”

At Hartland, cameras do seem to help reduce vandalism. According to Assenmacher, the incidents of vandalism that have occurred at the school have been traced — after the fact, using video collected by the cameras — to students from other schools. “Kids that are not from Hartland don't know that the cameras are there,” he says. “Overall, we have little vandalism in our schools. I believe this is because so many people use our facilities so often. We have adults moving in and out of our building all the time, especially after school in the evening and on weekends. Kids thinking about vandalism won't do anything in front of cameras they know are there or when adults are around.”

Dorn agrees: “Obviously when you open your school to the public, it does make it easier for a non-custodial parent, child molester or outside vandal to get into the school. But I think you can have the openness that goes with sharing a school with the public and still have good security. You just have to think about it.”

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