Securing the Suburban High School

These days, when towns approve funding for new high schools they demand trendy architects, high-end sports complexes and security. Lots and lots of security.

By Scott Berinato

November 05, 2007 — CSO — About four years ago, in a New England suburb, voters agreed to raise their taxes in order to build a new, $64 million high school. The old school was a hundred years old and, if you blocked out the spiritless addition tacked on in the '60s, it was magnificent to look at. But the place was crumbling. It strained to support modern educational basics like computer labs and lacrosse practices.

It's important to note here that in the early 21st century, one no longer builds a high school. One builds a campus. The trend in public school design comes from realty, "curb appeal," and with the trend comes the attendant jargon. Auditoriums have become performing arts centers, cafeterias are dining commons and the gym is part of an athletic complex. Parents, home buyers, even prospective teachers increasingly (perhaps erroneously) judge a town's quality of education by the quality of its buildings. Schools have become civic marketing. They must attract the best educators, increase property values and even generate revenue.

And they must be modern marvels of safety and security. Security is, in fact, a major element in contemporary school design, and it is as much or more a part of curb appeal as FieldTurf.

Security earned this status in 1999, after the shooting massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. Despite the fact that a student's odds of being murdered at school today are less than one in two million—a risk two and a half times less likely than drowning in a bath tub—parents and teachers have internalized the vanishingly rare but ubiquitously publicized events like the shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech. These events are used to justify extreme levels of security that, if you haven't gone to high school in the past decade, you may find difficult to comprehend.

As elements of a school's curb appeal go, security is probably the most complicated. You can't just rename something or lay it down like plastic grass and protect it against all risks equally. So before construction at this school started, the architect, Mary (all names in the story have been changed), brought the principal stakeholders to city hall. Around the table sat the principal; representatives from the police, fire and the building committee; Brad, the district's head of facilities; and Mary herself. Sometimes the mayor sat in. Essentially, this committee operated as both the CSO and the business stakeholders the CSO reported to. Their job was to satisfy as best they could all the stakeholders' agendas while still effectively reducing risk, and then defend their decisions with each other and with the community, with parents especially, who Brad says, "happen to have the most to lose and the least understanding of risk."

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• In Brief: Notes on Securing a New England High School
• Four Low-Cost, High-Yield School Security Techniques
• Security Lessons Learned at the Suburban High School
• School Security: Statistics 101
• The Five Elements of a School Security Plan
• Four Low-Cost, High-Yield School Security Techniques
• School Security: Wrangling over Risks