A high school in Michigan is being redesigned to diminish the impact of a would-be mass shooter, complete with curved hallways and cement barricades for students and educators to take cover.

An ongoing $48 million construction project will renovate existing sections of Fruitport High School to add elongated, arching hallways to reduce an active shooter’s sightline, theoretically cutting down on the number of casualties if a gunman opened fire.

Crews are also installing oversized cement barriers in the hallways to allow students a place to hide, as well as impact-resistant film on all classroom windows at the 850-student school, Fruitport Superintendent Bob Szymoniak told WZZM.

“This building will be the safest, most secure building in the state of Michigan when it opens,” Szymoniak told the station, adding that construction is expected to wrap up in 2021.

Once completed, all classrooms in the school will also feature a corner that cannot be seen from the hallway and administrators will have the ability to instantly lock doors to the rooms with the push of a button, Szymoniak said.

The additional layers of safety will benefit both students and first-responders in the event of the emergency and will likely be noticed by school administrators and security professionals across the country, according to the superintendent.

“These are going to be design elements that are just naturally part of buildings going into the future,” he said.

An open house is planned at the school in October and school officials will host a special event in December to unveil the new classrooms, WZZM reports.

The frightening regularity of mass shootings in the United States was the impetus for the massive overhaul, Szymoniak told the Washington Post, citing the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and the 2018 massacre at Stoneman Douglas HS in Florida.

“If I go to FPH and I want to be an active shooter, I’m going in knowing I have reduced sight lines,” Szymoniak told the newspaper. “It has reduced his ability to do harm.”

The harrowing new reality for students and teachers alike isn’t something Szymoniak takes lightly, but 24 school shootings resulting in injury or death took place last year – and more than 228,000 students have been exposed to gun violence at schools since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, the Washington Post reports.

“I don’t want to have to have these conversations,” Szymoniak told the newspaper. “I don’t want to have to worry about having a school designed to prevent an active shooter.”