Page 115 - Security Today, July/August 2022

Students Are Sitting Ducks
“We trained our kids to sit under the table, and that's what I thought of at the time. But we set them up to be like [sitting] ducks.” That’s the lament of Arnulfo Reyes, a teacher at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, who was shot and seriously wounded in the attack. He witnessed the horrific murder of all of his students right in front of him.
School districts have had 23 years since Columbine to figure out a solution. Yet, kids keep getting shot at and killed in schools. Why? Simple—they are sitting ducks, help- less targets.
That’s wrong. Sitting ducks are for carni- vals, not schools. Regardless of what security measures are in place on the front end, once a shooter gets in the building, schools need something else to prevent casualties.
Although the challenge of preventing casualties seems elusive, there now exists a key formula to meet it successfully. Admit- tedly, school safety requires a multi-layer approach, such as, “see something, say some- thing” campaigns, campus security person- nel, security cameras, metal detectors, panic alarm systems, door locks, etc. However, should any of those front-end measures fail
or prove inadequate (and they sometimes do), what then? At the end of the day, kids in classrooms must be protected, somehow.
Searching for the Somehow’
When I woke up on Valentine’s Day 2018, my foremost thought was, “Where should I take my fiancée for dinner tonight?” Little did I (or anyone) know that within just a few hours, a horrific tragedy was about to occur. In a period of less than four minutes, a shooter killed 17 victims and wounded another 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Very soon after this, our school board and I urgently embarked on a mission to find the best way to protect our precious students and staff should a similar threat ever befall our campus.
The big question was this: What can pro- tect potential victims—in reality, sitting ducks—from a killer with a gun?
Lori Alhadeff, whose daughter Alyssa was shot and killed at the Parkland massacre, wisely said, “Seconds matter.” Once a shooter arrives on campus, there is precious little time before the carnage begins—and ends. At Sandy Hook, for example, before the
arrival of the first police officer, the shooter had already fired 154 rounds within five min- utes, ultimately killing 20 children and 6 adults.
So, here is what is needed to save lives: Immediate access to a safe place right in the classroom, where most casualties occur. That is the key, the “somehow” that was needed.
Once we realized this, we began an earnest search for such a solution.
The Somehow’ Found
After much investigation, we found an American manufacturer that produced cus- tom modular bullet-proof safety pods that could fit right into our classrooms and were capable of stopping high-caliber rounds from assault weapons, like the AR-15 or AK-47. These safety pods are made using a military-grade ballistic steel used for mili- tary vehicles. As an added bonus, they could even protect occupants from the most pow- erful EF-5 tornado, since the pods had origi- nally been designed as tornado shelters.
Without delay, we installed these safety pods in every classroom so that, should a shooter gain access to one of the school buildings (or if a tornado approached the
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