'We’re misappropriating millions of dollars to fortify our schools,' one analyst says. AP Photo/Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks Post-Newtown: 'It's my job to die'

Taxpayers have invested tens of millions to upgrade school security in the year since the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

But our children may not be any safer.


Friday’s shooting at Arapahoe High School in Colorado is a chilling reminder that violence can still erupt out of the blue. But also deeply troubling to safety experts is the fear that these incidents instill in other schools — fear that too often leads teachers and administrators to overreact. When every potential threat is seen as a precursor to mass murder, fear can override common sense and prompt school staff to make rash decisions that endanger everyone, according to security analysts and psychologists who have studied school shootings.

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Again and again in the past year, security consultant Michael Dorn has seen school personnel make reckless decisions in crisis simulations: to accost a menacing man approaching a playground from afar rather than hustling the children inside; to lunge at a student threatening suicide with a gun rather than talk it out from a distance; to gather textbooks to hurl at a potential intruder before taking the basic precaution of locking the classroom door.

“It’s our consensus that the level of emergency preparedness has actually degraded since Sandy Hook,” said Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit consulting firm based in Macon, Ga.

Dorn supervises 30 analysts who run thousands of crisis simulations a year at hundreds of schools. They have seen a sharp shift since Adam Lanza shot his way into the elementary school in Newtown, Conn., exactly one year ago, killing 20 first-graders, the principal, the school psychologist, two teachers and two teacher’s aides. School staff now seem to expect every incident to escalate into an armed assault, Dorn said, and many resolve to respond with aggression — even when the far safer course would be to back off and call for help.

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“They say, ‘It’s my job to die,’” Dorn said. “We didn’t see that prior to Sandy Hook.”

Dewey Cornell, a clinical psychologist and education professor at the University of Virginia, sees another danger as well. Despite the grim headlines, the rate of violent assaults has been dropping sharply for decades at the nation’s 100,000 schools. That means the chance of gunfire at any one building is vanishingly remote.

Yet schools girding for the worst are spending scarce resources on armed guards and flexing zero tolerance policies that require suspending students for nearly any infraction. All of that alienates students and raises tensions, he said — not exactly a recipe for a safe, secure environment.

“We’ve created this idea of school violence that is grossly exaggerated. That’s a very costly misperception,” said Cornell, a lead author on a recent report on gun violence for the American Psychological Association. He’d rather see funds go to hire more counselors and provide more services to address students’ day-to-day concerns, such as bullying, or to improve conditions in their neighborhoods.

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“We’re misappropriating millions of dollars to fortify our schools, when our children are in far more danger in our homes and our communities,” Cornell said.

Even those who see a solid need for some security upgrades agree that districts have often gone overboard. The consulting group IHS predicts that the market for school and campus security equipment will jump from nearly $550 million this year to $720 million next year to more than $900 million by 2017.

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“There has been a lot of needless expenditure,” said Paul Timm, president of RETA Security, Inc., in Lemont, Ill.

He understands the impulse, though: “Everyone’s heart was broken by Sandy Hook.”

Some security upgrades are relatively inexpensive, such as improving exterior lighting or retrofitting classroom doors so teachers can lock them swiftly from the inside. Others are more elaborate: Window reinforcements to prevent glass from shattering. Safe rooms. Panic buttons. Software that scans visitor IDs and runs them through a law-enforcement database.

A middle school in Shady Cove, Ore., set up a network of surveillance cameras that provide live video feeds of every classroom and hallway to the sheriff’s department the moment a staff member triggers an alarm. Teachers in Sweetwater, Texas, have emergency alert software on their laptops so they can call police with a click. A charter school in Oakland, Calif., is testing a $15,000 “shot spotter” system that transmits information about the exact location of any gunshots fired — plus the school’s floor plans — to police at the push of a button.

Dorn supports some of the safety upgrades but warns that better training is every bit as important as high-tech systems. He has seen principals so primed to call a lockdown that they neglect to evacuate the building when a fire alarm sounds. He’s seen teachers so well-trained to use the panic button in a crisis that they dash to the office to push it when a child starts choking in the cafeteria instead of rushing to administer first aid.

“We’ve inadvertently conditioned people in this country to the extreme,” Dorn said.

Before Sandy Hook, school personnel presented with a simulated crisis forgot, on average, one key step when outlining their response, Dorn said. They’re now missing an average of 1.7 steps.

“We’re not talking about whether they remembered to implement their media protocol,” Dorn said. “We’re talking about whether they remembered to call 911 or lock a door. We’re talking about life-and-death action steps.”

Amid all the focus on beefing up security, it’s worth remembering that Sandy Hook was doing a lot right. It controlled access to the front door. Emergency response plans hung on classroom walls, above maps of emergency evacuation routes. Not two months before the shooting, the school had held an emergency evacuation drill. “Safety first at Sandy Hook,” Principal Dawn Hochsprung had tweeted, attaching a photo of her young charges lined up outside the school.

“It’s a reminder that even with all those things in place, schools cannot be expected to prevent all crime,” said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center. “It’s about doing everything you reasonably can — and realizing you can’t do everything.”

But that’s a tough message for school administrators — let alone parents — to hear.

The past year has brought a surge of business for the ALICE Training Institute of Medina, Ohio, which runs workshops that teach aggressive responses to armed intruders. Instead of cowering under desks, students, teachers and administrators are instructed to flee when they can and fight when they must. About 400 school districts across the country, serving about 2 million children, have trained in the ALICE protocol, according to Greg Crane, the institute’s founder and president.

A similar protocol is taught by a six-minute video produced by the public safety office in Houston, Texas. “ Run –Hide– Fight” was funded by the federal government and has been promoted by several agencies, including the Department of Education, which links to it in its guides to effective school emergency response plans. The video has been viewed more than 2.5 million times on YouTube alone.

Set to eerie music, the video depicts a muscular young man clad in black opening fire in an office as terrified workers seek to run, hide, or as a last resort, fight back, using chairs and belt buckles as improvised weapons. “It may feel like just another day at the office,” the narrator intones, as statistics about mass shootings — including school shootings — roll across the screen. “Unfortunately, you need to be prepared for the worst.”

Critics say the video puts undue attention on a very rare scenario, fueling a climate of fear. Dennis Storemski, the director of public safety for Houston, dismisses those critiques. “I don’t think it was the video that created that issue,” he said.

For their part, federal officials stress that “Run-Hide-Fight” is just one facet of the government’s broad response to Sandy Hook.

The Justice Department made $45 million in grants to put 356 new school resource officers on duty in schools across the country, including in Newtown.

The Education Department and Health and Human Services are asking Congress for $300 million to help schools buy security equipment, hire counselors, develop crisis plans, teach conflict resolution and train staff to recognize signs of mental illness.

“We are working with school districts across the country to help prevent something like the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary from ever happening again,” said David Esquith, director of the Education Department’s Office of Safe and Healthy Students.

That sounds a lot more certain than many security experts feel.

Christopher Bromson, the public safety director in Enfield, Conn., has directed a substantial upgrade to school security, including hiring officers to patrol every campus. But he can’t give teachers, principals or parents the blanket reassurances they seek.

“People are so desperate to have someone come in and tell them, ‘Do this and you’ll all be safe,’” Bromson said.

He wishes he could.