New wave of shootings brings school security back to the forefront

Oct 3, 2006 2:32 PM

           

In the span of a month, schools across the country have seen a dramatic rise in violent incidents:
* A 32-year-old dairy truck driver storms a one-room Amish school in Pennsylvania and kills five girls.
* A drifter walks into a Colorado school and fatally shoots a student before taking his own life.
* Wisconsin authorities charge three boys with plotting a bomb attack on their high school.
* A student in a rural school allegedly shoots his principal.
* A gunman bursts into a Vermont elementary school looking for his ex-girlfriend and guns down a teacher.
Is school security at fault? Experts say there is simply no way to guarantee that a stranger or student won't be able to injure or kill on school grounds.
"When you factor in unpredictable outsiders, when you have a roaming monster walking into the schools, we have to be realistic," Kenneth Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm in Cleveland, tells The Associated Press. "There are some incidents you're not going to be able to prevent."
Since the 1999 Columbine massacre that left 15 people dead, there has been a determined effort among administrators, principals and teachers to improve school safety. Law enforcement officers across the nation and around the world have added training specifically intended to address school violence.
And technology has played a pivotal role in many of the security enhancements. From metal detectors to picture ID cards to video surveillance and mass-notification systems.
In response to the Pennsylvania shooting Monday, U.S. authorities issued new warnings about security at schools but said there was little more they could do to boost safety without turning classrooms into inhospitable fortresses.
Officials in several school districts said they had sent e-mails or letters to principals and parents urging heightened awareness.
"You can't keep all these incidents from happening because schools are not fortresses," Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, a California-based firm that provides advise and training to schools across the country, tells American Family Publishers (AFP). "You can't provide 100-percent protection."
Of what value is a metal detector when an attacker is willing to kill others and take his or her life? Or threat-evaluation software, when most attackers do not make a threat before an attack? Those are the questions federal researchers who conducted the most thorough study of school shootings across the nation, are asking.
The researchers, who come from the U.S. Secret Service and Department of Education, see technology as a key component to an overall security plan that involves emergency response plans and recognizing subtle changes in a students' behavior.
"The thrust of our recommendations is not that metal detectors and the like are irrelevant," one of the researchers, psychologist Randy Borum of the University of South Florida, tells MSNBC. "They're target-hardening. But they're insufficient."
Adds William Modzeleski, director of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program for the U.S. Department of Education: "We're cognizant of the fact that metal detectors do keep out some type of guns, but I think it's a balancing act. Some schools with a weapons problem can benefit from them. But they can send a wrong message and have an adverse effect on the climate of the school."
"It also sends a message that if you have a metal detector, you're safe," he continues, "and I'm not sure that's so."
Ever since Columbine in 1999, Colorado school officials have been taught to write emergency response plans and practice them, to lock down schools and evacuate when it appears safe. That seemed to work well in Bailey, Colo., as hundreds of students were evacuated to safety last week.
Law enforcement officers who once were taught to set up a perimeter and wait for SWAT teams to show up are now trained in "active shooter" programs that call for the first officers on the scene to enter the building and work as quickly as possible to locate the gunman, Trump adds.

See how one school in Spokane, Wash., put its emergency response plans to the test, from the June issue of Access Control & Security Systems: Put to the Test, by Erin Semple.

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