With due respect to those who are asking me to comment on last night's tragic mass shooting at UCSB (University of California at Santa Barbara) in Isla Vista, CA—I no longer have anything to say about what is now part of normal American life.
-- Director and activist Michael Moore via Facebook
In 1999 a mass shooting at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colo., left 13 people dead and 27 people injured, forever changing the landscape of school safety planning. Nevertheless, that attack was followed by more high profile U.S. school shootings during the last decade and a half, including the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, which left 32 people dead and 17 injured, and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that resulted in 28 deaths.
But these are just the widely reported incidents. There are many more incidents in U.S. schools involving guns, knives, and other weapons that are reported only at the local level. In response to this overall trend, more states are passing campus gun laws that allow students and law enforcement officers to carry firearms in schools and on college campuses. As such, schools must be prepared to respond to the threat of weapon-related violence.
A Wary Welcome
School shootings and the resulting school safety issues “have been on everyone’s minds since Columbine,” says John Castellana, chairman of TMP Architects in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. “There is a much keener awareness of visitors coming and going. As a result, we have focused on having a direct pathway so that they have to check in and go through an administrative area.”
TMP’s design approach to securing a school is indicative of an emerging national trend. In the K-12 arena, security focuses largely on entryways and maintaining control over who has access to the building and to students.
New schools are designed so that there is really only one primary entryway. “The entryway needs to be very clear to visitors,” says Jim M. Ivy, vice president at RBS Design Group in Owensboro, Ky. “You don’t want people wandering around the school trying to figure out where the front door is.”
In most cases, this entails creating what John Castellana refers to as a “Welcome Center.” This welcome center includes the administrative office space and the sequencing area that visitors must pass through in order to gain access to the school.
This sequence generally requires that visitors be granted entrance via a secured doorway that leads directly to an administrative area where they are checked-in by school staff before they can gain entry to the school.
90 percent of schools have some sort of electronic surveillance or door monitoring system combined with architectural improvements to create this pathway, Castellana says. This may include a camera system with which school staff can see visitors before buzzing them into the school, or it may be designed so that they can actually see the visitors through some sort of glass wall.
Architectural firms are tasked with creating secure entryways that maintain an open feeling that is the hallmark of the American school system. “We want to make the school open, but safe at the same time,” says Castellana. “So it is important to get the sequencing right.”
[PHOTO GALLERY: Secure entrances for schools and universities]
One way of accomplishing this has been to use traditional features in new ways. For example, the vestibule has been a traditional part of school design to help provide a transitional space between the school and the outside world, and for practical purposes such as to block the wind and other elements.
“Now vestibules have become a little larger,” says Castellana. This provides an important security feature because the “inside doors of the vestibule get locked off so that when visitors come in, you can see them and then you can buzz them into the office area where they get credentials before they get into school area.”
TMP recently worked on creating such a space at an elementary school in Evanston, Ill., where the firm installed a glass vestibule. This creates what is technically a holding area, but one that is open and welcoming.
Older schools are being retrofitted in order to create similar secure vestibules. This can result in a design challenge because oftentimes in older schools the administrative offices are not located in an exterior area, explains Castellana. “In those situations, the office space is being relocated so that they can get the sequencing,” he says.
And always the balancing act is between a school that functions like a stronghold versus a school that feels like one.
“We have worked with lots of different districts and everyone wants [their schools] to be bunkers. But it is totally against the open system we have in the United States,” says Castellana. “So we have ways to do it. We use electronics, laminated glass. This won’t stop [an intruder], but it will slow him down.”
Inside Out
Another concern is protecting students and staff from other students who may be the instigators of a shooting or stabbing. Many schools, particularly high schools in urban areas, have created checkpoints equipped with metal detectors through which students must pass before entering the school. Again, says Castellana, “we don’t want to make them feel like they are going through checkpoints and we want to make [schools] as open as possible. But we have to find ways to have controlled open access.”
Entryways are particularly important to K-12, but it is more difficult to monitor entrances on college campuses where there are many buildings with numerous doorways, as well as incalculable points of campus entry. As such, security concerns are often concentrated on recreational facilities and areas with a high volume of traffic, says David Larsen, senior vice president at TMP Architects.
As in K-12, it is important to funnel people through an identifiable front door. In addition, is important to have open and transparent facilities so that you can see what is going on in the facility. Equally important, is acoustical transparency “so that you can hear when a scuffle is about to transpire,” says Larson. Corridors and hallways also are important to creating safe spaces in schools in both K-12 and higher education.
In K-12, it is useful to have hallways be configured in the shape of a capital letter, says Ivy. “A ‘T,’ a ‘Y,’ an ‘L’—something that makes sight lines easy. We have created situations where an administrator can sit at her desk and have visual control over the corridors.”
Conversely, Brian Sell, architect and senior designer at Moody Nolan in Columbus, Ohio, said that you should also consider how sight lines could make an attack easier. If an administrator can see everything in a hallway, so can a shooter. Long, unadorned hallways can also be a design challenge because they are somewhat plain and uninviting. However, having open corridors also diminishes antisocial behavior. Eliminating places where students can hide minimizes behavior such as bullying, and may aid in the detection of weapons and other contraband, says Sell.
Similarly, in higher education, it is a design necessity to connect all major functional spaces with a concourse and include a wide corridor and social gathering area, says Larson. The key is to eliminate “nooks and crannies so that people are stuck out in the open,” he adds.
“If we are designing a new school, we create a clear and direct circulation system with open corridors,” says Larson. This can be a challenge when renovating older spaces, however. For example, Larson’s firm recently retrofitted a space at the University of Alabama where they had to eliminate side corridors and make the space more open for surveillance. The goal was to create common areas that are open and within view of administrators and security personnel, a concept Larson calls “friendly supervision.” These spaces eschew “a lot of twists and turns,” he says.
In addition to design, schools are employing new technologies to manage access to their facilities. Cameras and electronic lock-systems are hallmarks in most K-12 schools. Some are installing systems that allow teachers to lock classroom doors from the inside using a key to prevent intruders, Ivy says. At the college level there is increasing use of advanced recognition technology, including biometrics, to limit access to certain facilities, says Larson.
An interesting unintended development is that design features initially intended to protect students from natural disasters such as tornadoes and hurricanes now double as safe havens in the event of a shooting.
For instance, the University of Alabama asked for a large open space to accommodate up to 3,000 people. The space needed to be designed so that people could enter quickly whenever there was a tornado, but also to anticipate another emergency situation, such as a shooting, Larson says.
Similarly, some K-12 schools are designed with precast concrete planks over the corridors, according to Ivy. It allows architects to put the heating and cooling units on the platform and service them without disrupting the classrooms, but it also creates a storm shelter outside the classroom. This concrete enclosure could also provide a level of security in the event of a shooting.
In many areas tornadoes and storms are disasters that are routinely anticipated and for which schools must be prepared. Similarly, it seems increasingly common that schools must be likewise prepared for gunfire.
