Not hard enough...

Why hardening schools hasn't stopped school shootings

The president wants to arm teachers and staff, but research suggests that may do little to prevent shootings.

By CAITLIN EMMA

President Donald Trump has called for “hardened schools” to end the cycle of school massacres. But he was unimpressed last week when told about a Midwestern campus dubbed "the safest school in America."

An Indiana state official had suggested he consider Southwestern High in Shelbyville a national prototype because of its state-of-the-art cameras that send real-time footage to a sheriff’s office, smoke cannons in hallways, bulletproof doors and teachers who wear panic buttons.

Trump had only one question: “Do you have anybody inside with a gun that can take on the man that's right outside the door — that by the way, can shoot right through the steel doors?”

Trump has defined school hardening as arming officials inside schools — a model already in wide practice using law enforcement officials, rather than teachers, and which has not stopped the carnage except in a handful of isolated successes.

Research is spotty, but it suggests that simply fortifying schools — whether through the presence of armed officials or beefed up security — does little to reduce the likelihood of school shootings and is not nearly as effective as identifying threats and intervening early to address them.

“School shootings are prevented because shooters make threats — people pay attention to those threats and intervene, and those shootings are prevented,” said Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist and education professor at the University of Virginia who focuses on school violence prevention. “We need to focus a lot more on prevention … the best way to prevent school shootings everywhere is to help our kids be successful at school.”

That view is shared by Guy Grace, security director for Littleton, Colo., public schools, which still bear the scars of the 1999 Columbine shooting that killed 13 people and a second shooting in 2013 that left two students dead.

Grace said he got “goosebumps” from the similarities between the shooter who killed 17 people in Parkland, Fla., and the Littleton senior who stormed Arapahoe High School five years ago with a shotgun, 125 rounds of ammunition, a machete and three Molotov cocktails, killing another student and himself.

“The guy that shot [up] our school — same thing,” he said. “There were warning signs before he did it and no follow up.”

After Columbine, that community had hired armed school resource officers and spent an estimated $25 million to fortify its schools, Grace said. Nonetheless, an investigation found that there were "many missed opportunities" to share information about senior Karl Pierson's anger problems, threats and gun ownership and to intervene before he entered the school.

Grace acknowledged that an armed officer likely prevented further loss of life that day. After Pierson fatally shot 17-year-old Claire Esther Davis, he headed to the library, where the officer had rushed to meet him. Pierson then turned the gun on himself.

“It’s good to have law enforcement or trained professionals in the buildings," Grace said. "But I don’t believe these people are going to stop because of the armed presence in schools."

What might have been prevented the attack altogether was paying more attention to reports of Pierson's mental distress and ensuring he couldn’t get his hands on a shotgun.

“We hardened our facilities, but if we can focus more on being preventative as a nation, then we can go a long way,” Grace said.

Hardening security was Indiana's single-minded focus after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012. Southwestern High School was chosen by the Indiana Sheriff’s Association to test a state-of-the-art security program, put in place in 2015.

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill told Trump last week the school has “countermeasures that can be employed from the Sheriff's Department within seconds to contain the attacker and, in a sense, turn the attack on them.”

For example, smoke canisters can be released to blind and confuse a shooter.

“That gives time, as you know, that critical time when he's alone looking for targets,” Hill told Trump last week, according to a transcript of the meeting. “Now he [is] discombobulated, he doesn't know where he's going.”

“Hopefully. Hopefully,” Trump said.

“Well, that's the idea,” Hill said. “I mean, these are not —”

“In the meantime, he's shooting everybody, though,” Trump said.

But Hill said in an interview with POLITICO that Indiana schools, including Southwestern, also prioritize detecting threats and intervention.

“A very significant part of the program is knowing their students, knowing what their issues are and knowing their concerns," he said. "You’re looking for signs of stress in a child’s life, various signs that point to whether a child is in need of intervention. … Many schools are doing that, and we just need to make sure that all schools are doing that.”

Virginia took a very different tack after Sandy Hook, becoming the first state in the nation to ensure that all public schools were assessing potential student threats, based on Cornell’s research on violence prevention.

Every public school in the state has a threat assessment team trained to identify such threats, evaluate their seriousness and take appropriate action, whether referring the student to counseling, mental health services or police intervention. The model has been endorsed by Sandy Hook Promise, a national nonprofit organization founded and led by several family members whose loved ones were killed at Sandy Hook.

Cornell is often asked whether the model has prevented school shootings. That’s tough to determine, he said.

Virginia schools conducted more than 9,000 threat assessments last year and none resulted in death or serious injury, Cornell said. Schools have seen fewer racial disparities in school discipline, fewer suspensions and less instances of bullying. They’ve also created a climate in which students feel safer talking to adults and teachers have reported feeling safer, he said.

“We’ve had hundreds of kids who’ve threatened to shoot somebody or hurt somebody, but they didn’t,” he said. “When people pay attention to those threats and intervene, those shootings are prevented.”

Still, a recent University of Virginia press release noted that “the Florida shooting should be a wake-up call for threat assessment teams in Virginia schools.”

Statewide surveys have found that only 50 percent of Virginia K-12 teachers know that their school has a threat assessment team, the release said.

“Also troubling is that state funding to train school teams has fallen off the state’s priority list — and despite the state mandate, 34 percent of Virginia schools reported that they did not conduct any threat assessments last year.”