Dobbs Elementary School, Rockwall ISD >>
TURNING THE PAGE ON SAFETY & SECURITY IN OUR SCHOOLS Leesa Vardeman, VLK Principal On May 18, 2018, school safety changed forever for Texas schools. Eight students and two teachers were fatally shot, and thirteen were wounded at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe ISD, located near Houston. The shooting was the second-deadliest school shooting in the United States that year and it was in our backyard. No longer were we commiserating with public schools states away; we were faced with devastating violence in our own community. School safety immediately became a priority for state and local leaders. Governor Abbott called for a plan to make Texas schools safer and charged legislators to analyze the situation and report how the state could meet those needs. The Texas Society of Architects stepped into the discussion by creating a School Safety Workgroup that consisted of a dozen representatives of the top education design firms throughout the state to assist in solving this problem and become a resource to legislators.
As a member of the work-group, I witnessed a group of specialized, long-tenured architects who had dedicated their entire careers to designing schools that support learning, struggle to develop a solution that would just make this problem go away. As architects, we have a front-row seat with local school districts when it comes to planning, budgeting, designing, and implementing best practices. Each one of us has been part of significant safety and security-hardening and improved technology implementation over the past decade; yet the techniques employed did nothing to prevent this catastrophe. Beyond access control, security cameras, and twoway classroom communication, we quickly realized that to further harden our schools would only serve to exacerbate the situation. As architects dedicated to creating supportive environments, we were concerned that schools that look and function like prisons would serve only to amplify stress and anxiety in students. Continued on next page >>
2019 | EXPERIENCE | Vol. 6
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