Help Prevent "Mr. AB's Law"

I am taking part in AFT’s "Build it Up" blog campaign renew the discussion on the state of our schools’ physical environment. For my school, the most pressing issue is a combination of physical plant and school safety concerns.

I’m not that paranoid, but I can already imagine the news lead… “Voters also overwhelmingly approved Proposition XY, dubbed ‘Mr. AB’s law,’ in memory of a San Jose teacher who died in a 2012 school shooting…”

Last week, our school wiled away two perfectly good instructional hours practicing for “Code Red,” the school’s reaction to a dangerous situation on or near campus. I say wiled away because the hours were spent building and much more so unbuilding barricades. Barricades? Teachers spending hours piling and unpiling desks in front of doors is how we prepare for disaster? Yes, sadly. Our school is generally in good shape, physically, but there is one gaping hole in our safety: most of our doors don’t lock from the inside.

Consequently, in case of a “Code Red,” teachers wanting to lock their doors must race around to the outside, lock the door and dart back inside, exposing themselves and their classrooms to the threat. The police department advised us to use our best judgment about whether or not to take this risk and to additionally build barricades at the door and inside our classroom no matter what. The master key, we were told, might be compromised if the attacker starts with the office or a custodian. During the drill, my best efforts at a barricade took many minutes to set up and only slowed the intruder by a matter of moments. We simply don’t have enough time and enough heavy objects to really seal off a door without locks.

When I brought this concern up for discussion, I was told that there were fire and safety concerns about doors that lock too easily from the inside. The police officer also added that our handle locks were unreliable because they could be shot out. All it would take, however, to meet these issues and secure our doors is a set of deadbolts on each door, requiring a teacher’s key to lock from the inside and a safe-secured key to unlock from without. Requiring a key inside would prevent kids from locking themselves in, a safe-guarded key outside would keep the door secure in case the office is attacked.

While I accept that there is a small amount of paranoia implicit in suggesting such a plan and an even greater amount in enacting it, we have seen that such attacks are sadly far from the realm of inconceivability. If not the Amish, truly, what community can possibly imagine their schools are safe? And when compared to me, let alone an older teacher, trying to stack boxes of paper and layers of bookshelves in front of a door, it’s a simple addition that would make our classrooms vastly more secure. What a shame that, like so many steps in safety reform, we will wait to make this happen until its real necessity has been horrifically proven.