One year after the shooting that killed 17, some Parkland students and teachers say efforts to make their school safer won’t be enough

This story was reported by student journalists Hannah Kapoor, Elama Ali and Nadia Murillo of the Eagle Eye, the award-winning student newspaper of Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, as part of an ongoing partnership with Guardian US.

Once a month, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school (MSD) in Parkland, Florida must relive the most frightening day of their lives.

A “code red” drill is called over the intercom. Teachers stop teaching immediately, shut off the lights and cover their classroom windows.

Students are directed to remain silent and huddle in a designated “hard corner” – an area of the classroom that has been deemed safe because it would be out of the line of site of a shooter in the hallway. In recent weeks, red icons have been painted onto classrooms walls at MSD to indicate a hard corner. The hard corners also feature special “bleeding control kits” affixed to the walls containing materials to stop the blood flow from gunshot wounds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The painted red icon and a bleeding control kit for gunshot wounds indicate a ‘hard corner’ where students are expected to huddle during code red drills at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida. Photograph: Melissa E. Falkowski

While school administrators take steps to reduce the stress of these code red drills, including notifying students in advance so they can stay home if they find them too traumatizing, the drills inevitably bring back raw memories of the horrors that students and staff at MSD experienced one year ago today, when a 19-year-old gunman entered the school with an AR-15 assault rifle and killed 14 students and three teachers, and injured 17 others.

The recommendations to increase code red drills at MSD and and identify hard corners in classrooms were part of a major report released last month by the MSD public safety commission, a taskforce created after the shooting by Florida lawmakers. The commission was asked to analyze the shooting at MSD and other incidents of violence in the state to make recommendations to prevent future tragedies.

But the report has faced criticism from some students and teachers in Parkland for its focus on “hardening” schools as potential targets for mass shooters – and its failure to meaningfully address gun laws as a way to improve school safety. While student activists from Parkland kicked off a national movement to change gun laws in America over the last year, gun control receives little attention as a safety solution in the 400-plus-page report.

“Honestly, just having these kind of drills aren’t necessarily going to help,” says Faith Kimmet, a senior at MSD. “You want to teach people what to do in these situations – that’s important – but we also need to be doing things to make sure these shootings don’t happen at all.”

Other recommendations in the report include arming some teachers, adding bulletproof windows to schools and improving mental health services for troubled students. Representatives for the commission did not immediately respond to inquiries for this article.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Melissa E. Falkowski

The commission report found that the lack of code red training and designated hard corners in MSD classrooms contributed to the casualties. According to the report, the shooter “only shot people within his line of sight, and he never entered any classroom. Some students were shot and killed in classrooms with obstructed and inaccessible hard corners as they remained in [the shooter’s] line of sight from outside the classroom.”

The painted red icons that now designate hard corners at MSD began appearing in classrooms after the holidays, but some students and teachers say the new safe spaces do not make them feel any more secure.

“I don’t think hard corners are effective,” said Ivy Schamis, a history of the Holocaust teacher at MSD who lost two students during the shooting last year. “If the students were all in what the school deemed as the ‘hard corner’ they wouldn’t have been safe.

The students in her classroom were killed when the shooter shot through a glass window in a classroom door. “While I was crouching on the floor with my students, shaking from bullets flying through the classroom, I was watching. I was waiting for a hand to come in [though the broken window] and unlock [the door] … he could have easily come in. Thank god he didn’t,” Schamis said.

Play Video 2:22 Parkland shooting one year on: powerful speeches from the survivors – video

Class size is another factor that some say makes hard corners an impractical solution. Many public schools across the county, including MSD, are overpopulated. That means hard corners are only effective for the fastest students who get there first.

“It’s great to say that I have a space marked for 25 kids. But if you have 42 kids in your room, you have children that are not going to fit in that space. So then how safe does that space actually become?” asked MSD statistics teacher Kimberly Krawczyk. “I think the numbers become lower for casualties and injuries if there had been room to get everyone in properly into their corners and out of sight.”

Some students, however, are grateful for the hard corners and say they can save lives.

“[Hard corners] are the reason why my class was safe during the shooting,” says junior Sarah Soares, who was in one of the few MSD classrooms that had a designated hard corner at the time of the shooting last year. “We knew where to go. Some of the classes … were harder to hide in and there was no safety aid kit. The kids who were then shot, bled a lot and couldn’t have really been helped.”

But many in the MSD, Parkland and Coral Springs community believe school safety is an illusion when someone who is determined to kill has easy access to a gun.