Is Any Place Safe?

By S.C. Gwynne/Odessa

When students went back to school last week at Permian High in Odessa, Texas, they wondered what had happened to the place over the summer. Gone was their old wide-open campus, now surrounded by a security fence with controlled entry points and clusters of surveillance cameras. Inside the school, they had to wear bar-coded photo-ID badges, and in many classrooms, "black boxes" with mirrored eyes stared implacably down from the walls, above signs that read, IT SHOULD BE ASSUMED THERE IS A CAMERA INSIDE THIS ENCLOSURE RECORDING VIDEO AND AUDIO.

What had happened was that Permian, like thousands of other schools alarmed by recent campus shootings, had responded by clamping down on all sorts of security problems, from fights to theft, vandalism, graffiti and intruders. In an approach not unlike urban police clampdowns of recent years, schools have tried to create a new environment of conspicuous order and security. What school administrators, parents and students worry about most are potential copycat gun crimes, especially after it was revealed last week that T.J. Solomon, 15, accused of shooting six classmates last May in Conyers, Ga., had referred to the Littleton, Colo., shootings in a note left under his bed. And last week's armed assault on a suburban day-care center in Los Angeles only heightened the sense that every place is vulnerable.

As a result, students returning last week to Allen High School in suburban Dallas found four new permanent, airport-style metal detectors and a sign (apparently not vetted by the English department) that reads WELCOME TO ALLEN HIGH SCHOOL. UPON ENTERING THESE PREMISES ALL CARRY-IN ITEMS ARE SUBJECT TO SEARCH. In Orange County, Fla., students who wanted lockers or parking permits for their cars had to sign a waiver agreeing to random searches of both and stating that they "waive any expectation of privacy." Instead of an old-fashioned fire drill, a high school in Williams Bay, Wis., carried out an extraordinarily dramatic exercise in the hope of showing students, teachers, police and paramedics what to do in case student gunmen storm the school: explorer scouts, dressed in camouflage and carrying rifles loaded with blanks, pretended to shoot the principal and take hostages.

Few schools, though, have tightened their security as thoroughly as Permian High. It has formed an alliance with Sandia Labs, based in Albuquerque, N.M., which has three decades of experience in locking down top-secret facilities that manufacture, transport and store nuclear weapons. Sandia started advising schools on security in 1991 after Congress ordered the labs to share the wealth of its technologies. Yet protecting a nuclear facility, says Sandia analyst Mary Green, is in some ways easier than securing a school. "Nuclear weapons usually stay where you put them," she says. "They don't have a lot of civil rights, and they rarely stick six of their friends into their Camaro to go eat lunch at Taco Bell."

The Sandia folks have learned fast. By 1992 they were employing "hand-geometry" readers at a New Mexico elementary school. These machines, which record the unique features of each human hand, were used to ensure that children were picked up from school only by an authorized person. In 1996 Sandia mounted its first major overhaul at the high school in Belen, N.M. Using a combination of video cameras, drug-testing kits, metal detectors, mobile Breathalyzers, ID badges and antigraffiti sealants, Sandia engineered a 90% drop in vandalism and theft, a 98% decrease in campus intruders, 95% fewer car break-ins and 75% fewer fights.

Permian would like to see similar results on its 2,200-student campus. Like Belen High, it's a relatively safe school. But its administrators know that their counterparts in Littleton and Conyers thought the same of their schools. At Permian, Sandia is using both low tech and high tech. Student identification badges will not only immediately show who belongs and who doesn't but also contain bar codes school administrators can instantly scan to show everything from previous tardiness and truancies to medical records. (The badges can be used to buy lunches and check out library books too.) Visitors receive high-tech badges that are good only for a day and fade to blank thereafter.

Outside the school, new perimeter fencing and cameras help control and monitor access to parking lots. Inside, tiny wireless cameras in black boxes will monitor classrooms. To safeguard such valuable school property as TVs and VCRs, Sandia has implanted each appliance with coded microdots that contain the name of the school and a serial number, which makes equipment easier to identify and recover. For the first time this fall, Permian will deploy drug and alcohol test kits, drug- and explosives-sniffing dogs and portable metal detectors for random searches.

Ironically, all this comes amid statistical signs of an overall decrease in school violence. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed a 30% decline from 1991 to 1997 in the number of students carrying weapons to school and a 14% decline in student fights. During the past school year, according to the U.S. Justice Department, there were about half the number of school-related violent deaths as there were six years earlier. So how does this square with Littleton and Conyers? In recent years, violence has declined from relatively high levels in inner-city schools, which for years have employed metal detectors and other security precautions. But school violence, and measures to deal with it, are moving out to the suburbs.

Not everyone accepts that all this is warranted. "Over this summer, we have had school boards putting together the most restrictive policies we have ever seen," says Diana Philip, director of the A.C.L.U. of Texas for the northern region, which has filed several suits against schools. "A lot of them are in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches." Before police can legally search someone, they generally must have "probable cause" to believe the person has committed a crime. But courts have recently given schools wide leeway in searching lockers, cars and backpacks and administering drug tests even on a random basis. Permian High administrators, for example, periodically seal off hallways, order students to drop what they are carrying, then run the purses and backpacks through metal detectors.

Private security companies say they have never seen so much demand for their services by schools, which has some wondering whether chronically fad-driven school administrators aren't overreacting. Says Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland, Ohio: "We tell people to calm down and think. There has been an explosion of overnight experts and charlatans. Schools are hiring all sorts of people with no expertise in school security." It's understandable, though, given the recent headlines, that principals and boards of education would rather be accused of going too far than have to explain someday why they didn't do everything they could--even hire the guardians of the nation's nuclear weapons--to help prevent a bloody incident at their schools.