Nashville shooting spurs U.S. schools to review security -- again
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[March 30, 2023]
By Julia Harte and Sharon Bernstein
(Reuters) -Security consultant Brink Fidler led the staff at the
Covenant School in Nashville through mass shooter training in early
2022, teaching them escape and lockdown skills and medical trauma
preparation.
On Wednesday, two days after a 28-year-old former student opened fire
inside the private Christian academy, Fidler said he saw signs that the
teachers had implemented his advice.
Walking through the grade school with police detectives, Fidler noted
that teachers had covered the windows and turned out the lights. He saw
a medical bag on a desk, ready to be used. Those who could safely get
out had evacuated with their students, while others appeared to have
locked down and hidden from the shooter.
"They followed every protocol we talked about," Fidler, a former police
officer, said in a telephone interview after helping police understand
what preparations the school had taken. "They were saving those kids'
lives."
Despite Covenant School's planning, the assailant entered the stately
stone building by shooting the glass out of several doors. The attacker
then killed three 9-year-old students and three adults before police
stopped the assault by fatally shooting the 28-year-old.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Mar/30/images/ads/current/hartsburggrain_sda_SFARM_2023.png)
The rampage has U.S. educators grappling once again with how to bolster
their defenses against such a threat, particularly at smaller
independent schools often viewed as havens of safety.
It was a reminder that any campus could be the target of gun violence,
spurring educators around the country to review security protocols and
try to reassure parents.
"There's been a sense of, 'Those problems don't seem to happen in our
types of schools,' and (Monday) shattered that," said Sean Corcoran,
head of school at Brainerd Baptist School, an elementary school of 330
students attached to a church in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Corcoran said Brainerd's glass doors were coated in bullet-resistant
laminate; it holds several active shooter drills a year; and the local
police station can access security camera feeds during emergencies. The
school is also installing panic buttons.
But he said the Covenant School shooting exposed how deadly such attacks
can be even when school leaders "did everything right."
Security experts who watched publicly released security camera and body
camera video from Monday's shooting said the Covenant School appeared to
have good safety protocols. The school, which serves about 200 students
from preschool to sixth grade, kept its doors locked and evacuated
students quickly so hallways would be mostly empty when the shooter
reached them.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Mar/30/images/ads/current/safetytip_sda_patricklee_2023.png)
They said additional safety measures might have helped. If the school
doors had been coated in bullet-resistant laminate, it might have taken
the shooter six or seven minutes to enter, buying additional time for
law enforcement to respond, said Mac Hardy, director of operations at
the National Association of School Resource Officers.
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![](../images/033023PIX/news_a9.jpg)
A vehicle is towed from the property as
community members pray while visiting a memorial at the school
entrance after a deadly shooting at the Covenant School in
Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. March 29, 2023. REUTERS/Cheney Orr
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2017/Jul/22/images/ads/current/rohlfs_lda_072017.png)
Fidler said the school had planned to add a protective laminate
layer to the glass door panels but it hadn't yet been installed.
School officials could not be reached for comment.
GUARDS AND GATES
Hardy said Covenant did not have a school resource officer whose
purpose is to avert or respond to threats such as active shooters.
In parts of the United States, law enforcement and school resource
officers were pulled off campuses in 2020, after the COVID-19
pandemic prompted a shift to virtual learning, and also in the wake
of protests against police violence that swept the country that
year, according to Chris Joffe, a security, safety and medical
support consultant.
His company, Joffe Emergency Services, holds disaster and
threat-preparedness training for schools around the country and has
heard from hundreds of schools since Monday's attack, Joffe said.
An armed guard is stationed at the front gate at Briarcrest
Christian School in the Memphis suburbs, according to an email on
Tuesday to parents of its approximately 1,750 students in
kindergarten through 12th grade, and off-duty local police officers
patrol campus during school hours.
Perimeter fencing surrounds the campus and gates are locked after
children are dropped off each morning.
"We operate on the premise of, put as many barriers up as you can
before an intruder can get into your school," said Briarcrest's
president, Caron Swatley.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Mar/30/images/ads/current/prarieland_sda_SFARM_2023.png)
It is not clear that hardening school security always works. A study
published in an American Medical Association online journal in 2021
showed armed guards at a school site did not reduce the number of
casualties in a shooting and may even be associated with an
increased number of deaths.
Ron Avi Astor, a University of California, Los Angeles professor who
studies school violence, said schools need to strike a balance
between adopting measures to keep kids safe and doing so much that
school feels like prison.
He said small schools in vulnerable Jewish and Muslim communities
have created subtle barriers to entry, such as erecting fencing and
moving entrances to the back of their properties, allowing schools
to protect children without traumatizing them.
"There are choices that can be made here, maybe some middle ground,"
Astor said. "Yes we want to protect them, but do we want to create
environments where they feel like there’s tanks and bazookas
everywhere?"
(Reporting by Julia Harte and Sharon BernsteinEditing by Colleen
Jenkins, David Gregorio and Cynthia Osterman)
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