Can school design help prevent school shootings?

“IT IS called a lockdown drill,” says Max, a nine-year-old pupil at a private school on the North side. “One teacher pretends to be an intruder. We have to hide in classroom, turn over our desks and hide behind them. We have to lock the door, barricade all the heavy stuff in front of the door and take a book or a ruler so we can throw it at the intruder if he comes in. We have to be super quiet. If someone says it is safe to come out we cannot do that, because it could be the intruder. We have to wait for the principal to come knocking on the door to tell us it is safe to come out.”

This year has already seen the murder in February of 17 at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which had regularly held lockdown drills for years. On May 18th a student at Santa Fe High School in Texas killed ten of his peers and wounded 13 with a shotgun and a revolver. In the days after the Santa Fe massacre Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant-governor of Texas, made two suggestions. One was to echo President Donald Trump’s call to arm teachers with concealed weapons (many teachers abhor the idea of being armed). The other way he suggested to make schools safer was by reducing the number of entrances to one or two (how children might flee such a place was not apparently a major consideration).