There are 9 types of school campuses. Each needs a different security strategy.

A SoCal campus with 50 separate classroom buildings needs a completely different emergency plan from a NYC school that's on the 1st floor of a high-rise office building.

During the Vice Presidential debate, JD Vance offered his ideas on preventing school shootings:

“We have to make the doors lock better. We have to make the doors stronger. We’ve got to make the windows stronger, and, of course, we’ve got to increase school resource officers.”

Vance’s answer mirrors a common misconception that drives product adoption across the school security industry. The concept of a strong door is rooted in a school being designed like a castle with one way in and one way out. This seemingly simple idea to secure the building quickly falls apart once you realize that thousands of schools across the country have open-air hallways where every classroom door opens to the outside.

Fortifying hundreds of doors at an open air-campus is pointless because students go in and out of them every 45 minutes.

Putting a fence around the campus is another fortification strategy, but where do you put a fence at a school on a city block where the doors open directly to the street? Inversely, at a rural, mega campus like Apalachee High in Georgia, a fence surrounding the entire campus would be 2 miles long. How would school police officers patrol this huge fenceline when an assailant could easily hide in the woods and jump over it right a guard passes by?

I believe that many security products and strategies are misaligned because people think of every k-12 school as just a simple brick building with a big front door and long hallways. This is probably what JD Vance’s schools in suburban Ohio were like. Many of the public schools in the Northeast and Midwest are brick schoolhouses that were built between the 1900s and 1950s. Vance’s perception that every school is the same single-door schoolhouse is clear in his comments in Arizona on September 4.

But the United States is bigger and more diverse than just the brick buildings of the Rust Belt. School campus designs have changed significantly over the last 20 years as school districts consolidate multiple schools into a single mega campus with college-style athletic facilities and shopping mall amenities. While every single school campus has unique features that need to be factored into a security plan, there are generally nine types of k-12 schools.

1. Urban (part of high-rise) with street level doors

2. Urban (standalone) with doors that open directly to the street

3. Urban (standalone) with a fenced campus

4. Single building with indoor hallways

5. Multiple attached building with indoor hallways

6. Multiple detached buildings with indoor hallways

7. Multiple detached buildings with open air hallways

8. Individual classroom buildings without hallways

9. Mega-school (shopping mall size) with theater, swimming pool(s), food court(s), indoor basketball practice courts, and +5,000 seat arena

10. Bonus challenge for any campus: Portable classrooms

Each one of these campus types needs a completely different set of emergency plans for everything from tornados to school shootings. At a school with individual classroom buildings that each have two exits, there is no need to lockdown when students can quickly evacuate. Inversely, at a school in a high-rise building where students need to go down multiple floors of stairs to evacuate onto a city street, it might make more sense to stay inside the classrooms during most emergencies.

So far in 2024, there have been shootings at eight different campus types. Nobody has coded all 98,000 schools across the country for these campus types (because I just created these categories) so there is no way to calculate the frequency of shootings as an adjusted per capita type value for each campus type. Shootings happened most frequently at schools that are single buildings with indoor hallways and schools that have multiple detached buildings. While a single school building could have a stronger door, on a campus with multiple detached buildings, students need to go in and out of the doors every 45 minutes to change classes.

The campus type needs to be considered in each emergency plan because think about how different the plan would be for a shooting that happens during lunch in the cafeteria. For reference, here is a breakdown of locations where shootings have happened on k-12 campuses.

When there is a shooting in the cafeteria:

• Individual classroom buildings without hallways: Students fleeing from the cafeteria will immediately be outside. Should they run to the nearest classroom (that might have a locked door since it’s lunch and the teacher is away) or should they keep running and leave the campus?

• Urban high-rise: The cafeteria is on one floor of a multi-floor school so if a shooting happens during lunch, should students run to classrooms on the same floor, take the stairs to different floors, or take the stairs down to the emergency exits out to the street? If the shooter fled immediately after shots were fired, should the students just stay inside the cafeteria?

• Mega-school: If a shooting happens in the cafeteria and there are students inside a classroom on the opposite end of campus that’s a 1/2 mile away, should they take any action or just continue with normal classes? If you are shopping inside Macy’s on the south end of a mall and someone is shot during a fight in the food court on the North end, do you need to take any action? Do you even need to know the shooting just happened?

Thinking about just one specific scenario at different types of campuses shows how useless (or even dangerous) it is to apply a one-size-fits-all emergency plan or security procedure to a school. Here is a quick overview and some planning considerations for each type of campus.

Urban (part of high-rise) with street level doors

These schools are part of larger high-rise buildings with other residential or commercial tenants and have street-level doors. Typically, students enter through a ground-level entrance that leads directly into a lobby or hallway. The limited outdoor space means that students might not leave the campus during the school day.

Example: New York City, Stuyvesant High School

Lockdowns in high-rise schools are complicated by the need to secure multiple floors of a large building that are only accessible by stairwells during emergencies. To move around the campus, students and staff must navigate elevators and stairwells which can become bottlenecks. If police are trying to get up the stairs as students are evacuating down, this creates the same problems as the World Trade Center on 9/11.

The urban location also makes it difficult to prevent an assailant from entering through a street level exit door or coming in using common areas shared with other building tenants (e.g., parking garage, courtyards, lobby). Due to fire codes, there may be stairwells from upper floors that access into the school’s floors if someone props an exit door or breaks a lock.

Urban (standalone) with doors that open directly to street

These schools consist of standalone buildings that open directly onto sidewalks or streets, with a single entrance for student access. The school’s outdoor spaces are often limited or shared with the surrounding neighborhood. These schools often have playgrounds and basketball courts that are owned and operated by the school while being open to the entire community after school hours.

Example: New York City P.S. 179