From Don P's link:
The simplest of security measures could have saved lives. But the school district failed to require that classrooms have designated “hard corners” — areas where students could hide outside the line of sight of a gunman looking through a doorway.
Broward County schools are not alone in this. I've probably told this story before, but it bears repeating because it demonstrates that school adminstrators, in general, don't understand what security is really about:
A few years after Columbine, the high school in my town was gearing up for a major reconstruction/rehabilitation/expansion program. State money was involved, and state law required that the plans be reviewed by the State Department of Education before the start of construction. But the unit that does those reviews was overwhelmed and couldn't do the review within the thirty days mandated by law, so the town had the option of letting the local building inspector perform the review for the School Facilities Unit.
But our town only has one building inspector, and he didn't have time to do it, either. I'm licensed as both an architect and a building inspector, so the town hired me to do the review. I found several code problems, and with the building inspector we sat down with the architects and got those resolved. BUT ...
One thing I saw wasn't a code violation, but it bothered me. In the older wings, the corridor walls were concrete block and the doors were solid wood with just a narrow vision panel. For the new wings, the architects were putting in doorways with wide (15" to 18") glass sidelights. Columbine was on everyone's mind, and I knew that "security" was supposed to have been one of the parameters for the project. The sidelights bothered me enough that I went to the police department and had a chat with the deputy chief. He agreed with me that they were a dumb idea.
So I went "off the reservation" and raised the issue -- not in my code report that went up to the School Facilities Unit (it wasn't, after all, a code violation), but to the building inspector and to the school board. The school board took it to the architects, and their response was, "We like them."
So the new classroom wings were built with the sidelights.
In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, the town adjacent to my town proudly announced that they were upgrading their grammar school with a new security system. It was all top secret, hush-hush for, you know, "security reasons." I knew their building inspector, so I asked him. The new security system they were installing was the same exact system that did NOT work at Sandy Hook.
So much for security. It was just lip service, and that's what we have to be aware of. School boards and school administrators will
always tell you they're all about "security," but they often don't have even a rudimentary understanding of what that entails. They need to be questioned and confronted.