Education Week - August 24, 2022 - 15

Shouldn't Classroom
Doors Lock From the
Inside? Here's Why
Many Don't
By Lauraine Langreo
Conversations about " hardening "
schools resurface after every mass
school shooting. And so do questions
about how the shooters manage to get
into classrooms.
There have been 27 school shootings
in 2022 that resulted in injuries
or deaths, according to the Education
Week school shooting tracker, and
119 since 2018, when Education Week
began tracking such incidents.
To prevent school shootings from
happening, some security experts and
educators suggest adding more physical
security measures, such as surveillance
cameras, metal detectors, bulletproof
glass, and door-locking systems,
as well as adding more law enforcement
and armed staff in schools.
On the surface, it would seem like
locking classroom doors would be
one of the simplest and easiest ways
to secure classrooms. But about 1 in
4 public schools in the United States
lack classroom doors that can be
locked from the inside, according to
the most recent data from the National
Center on Education Statistics
from the 2019-20 school year.
Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde,
Texas, where a shooter killed 21 people
in May, had problems with locks on
both interior classroom doors and
entrances and exits to the school
building, according to a report from a
special committee of the Texas legislature.
The building had a classroom
door system that required teachers to
lock their doors from the outside using
a key to secure their classrooms when
they weren't in them. Teachers often
propped the doors open or instructed
substitute teachers to do so if they did
not have keys for the locks, which were
limited and no longer in production.
School facilities experts who spoke
to Education Week said a combination
of issues is keeping schools from
changing their classroom door-locking
approaches: finances, logistics,
and fire safety regulations.
" They just haven't gotten around to
them yet, " said Mike Pickens, the executive
director of the National Council
on School Facilities. " They don't have
the money to do them all at once, so
they just kind of do them as they go. "
'It's always an issue of competing
needs'
The cost of changing classroom
door locks could be someone's entire
maintenance budget for a year, said
Andrew O'Leary, assistant superintendent
of finance and operations for
the New Bedford Public Schools in
Massachusetts.
Low-income districts like O'Leary's
have older buildings than other school
systems, have been left behind in
statewide capital investment, have
very basic per-pupil funding, and
often defer maintenance upgrades.
They likely have schools that are
among the 25 percent that lack classroom
doors that lock from the inside,
he said.
The United States invested $795
billion of local, state, and federal
money into its K-12 public schools
for the 2019-20 school year, according
to annual federal school spending
data published in May. Ten percent of
school revenue went toward " capital
outlay, " which includes construction,
renovation, and maintenance of
school facilities.
But because facilities funding
could be used for a variety of school
building systems-such as mechanical,
plumbing, electrical, telecommunications,
security, and fire suppres "
I
personally think
there needs to be
some regulation
on companies that
are pitching school
safety tools to
schools because
it's going to lead
to waste, fraud,
and abuse.
ANDREW O'LEARY
Assistant superintendent
of finance and operations
New Bedford Public Schools,
Massachusetts
sion systems-district leaders have to
make a decision about where to use
that money. And that means classroom
door-locking systems might
not be at the top of the priority list.
" Do we fix this roof that's leaking,
this beam that's falling down, or do
we put a lock on a door? " said Pickens.
" Those are all challenges, and
sometimes it's safer in some cases to
fix that beam rather than have a lock. "
" There's more to school health and
safety than just access control, and
I'm not minimizing access control
at all-that's important, but school
health and safety encompasses a lot
of things, " he added.
Twenty-five percent of U.S. public schools lack classroom doors that can be locked from the inside, according to the
most recent data from the National Center on Education Statistics.
Guy Bliesner, a school safety and
security analyst for the Idaho State
Board of Education, agreed that
when figuring out how to parcel out
the money, " it's always an issue of
competing needs. "
" We're already dealing with aging
infrastructure, " Bliesner said. " We
have a backlog of retrofits that need
to be done. [Changing door locks] is
simply another on the list and money
is a finite resource. "
'All of this is a huge logistic lift'
Even if there is money, figuring out
how to change all the locks in a school
or multiple schools in a district is a
hard task.
K-12 schools " are not set up for
significant maintenance work, " said
O'Leary from New Bedford schools.
" How can you replace 500 door locks?
How long is that going to take? And
how quickly can you do it? All of this
is a huge logistic lift. "
School facilities experts said there's
more to it than just putting a new locking
device on a door. Schools may also
need to replace the whole structure,
including the door, the door frame,
and the lockset, because they all have
to be compatible. Add in the manpower
needed to change the locks on
hundreds of doors in a school and the
maintenance for when locks break
and it gets quite expensive.
O'Leary said changing all the classroom
door locks in his 12,000-student
district could cost nearly $2 million.
He said there are schools from different
eras, so some have classroom door
locks while others don't. The district is
just starting the process of installing
new classroom door locks.
District leaders also have to think
about which classroom door-locking
mechanism will work best under
all the building safety regulations,
including fire safety codes and the
Americans with Disabilities Act.
" There's a huge issue that [conversations
about locking classroom
doors are] creating for other elements
of school safety beyond shootings, "
said O'Leary. " Sometimes we
forget in all of this that [safety] goes
beyond the rare but devastating possibility
of an attack. School safety
encompasses the health and safety
of every individual. In any building,
there's issues around fire safety.
That's pretty much what any building
plans for in its architecture, its
design, and its operation. "
Fire safety regulations require that
schools have doors that allow people
to have a one-motion egress, O'Leary
said. " Schools have been flooded
with sales pitches or demands for
different types of barriers that can be
deployed to lock the classroom, [but
those products] might stop people's
egress. "
In the New Bedford district, O'Leary
said they've changed the classroom
door locks in a couple of schools. They
ended up using a lock that has a standard
handle but in the center of that is
a red button that a teacher or student
can press and a deadbolt locks the
door. But if people need to get out of
the room quickly, they just pull down
the door handle and they can get out.
It's a one-motion egress, so it's up to
building code. If someone needs to
get in from the outside, that person
would need a key.
According to school facilities experts,
those kinds of door-locking
systems are what many schools are
turning to nowadays.
A deadbolt is much more effective
than a simple door latch that can be
opened with a credit card or other
flat device, Bliesner said. You also
don't have to fumble around to find
the keys because it can be locked
just by turning it or pressing a button
as opposed to doors that need to be
locked from the inside using a key.
If a kid locks a teacher out, the door
can still be opened from the outside
with a key.
" Some classrooms that need to be
locked from the outside defeats the
purpose of security, " Pickens said.
There are also some schools with
electronic locks with a 10-button
keypad on the outside-to enter, a
person needs to put in a code or scan
a badge. If the Wi-Fi is not working, a
key could also be used to get into the
room in these types of door-locking
systems.
'Tools do not keep children safe.
People keep children safe'
The problem with high-tech locks
is that they aren't always as secure
as simple, mechanical locks, said Joe
Dixon, president of consulting company
Dixon SmartSchoolHouse. Staff
members might be a little careless
and give their door codes to someone
and those codes end up in the wrong
hands. " It's pretty hard to beat the old
key, " he said. " Key makers cannot [legally]
duplicate a restricted keyway. "
The school security industry is starting
to become " problematic, " O'Leary
pointed out, because " it can be laden
with gimmicks, and districts have to
guard against gimmicks. "
He said one of the most common
gimmicks is school security apps.
" We get constant solicitation to purchase
all-in-one app setups that are
going to have loaded training modules,
school plans, communication relays
with police and emergency services-
all of which, to me, is a distraction from
the simple, common sense safety steps
that districts should be focusing on, "
O'Leary said. " I personally think there
needs to be some regulation on companies
that are pitching school safety
tools to schools because it's going to
lead to waste, fraud, and abuse. "
School safety experts who spoke with
Education Week said that at the end of
the day, the tools don't matter as much
if they're not implemented effectively.
They said school safety and security
needs to be put into a comprehensive
plan, and not just thrown together as a
knee-jerk reaction to a crisis.
" All of these things are tools and
tools are used by people. Tools do not
keep children safe. People keep children
safe, " Bliesner said.
The tools, he added, have to be
implemented with " fidelity and a
certainty that [people will] follow
through. All the tools in the world will
not make you safe if you don't use
them effectively. "
EDUCATION WEEK | August 24, 2022 | www.edweek.org | 15
Nam Y. Huh/AP

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