No Blanket Security Measures

Jack Swanzy, AIA, REFP, joined Jefferson County, Colo., Public Schools in 1992 as coordinating architect, managing a $325 million bond program. In 1998, Swanzy became director of planning and design; all design and planning for future facilities and existing renovations go through him. At present Swanzy is managing a $400 million bond program, which will carry the 88,000-student district into 2003. Swanzy has been involved in the educational design field for 36 years. In private practice, his concentration was adult-education facilities. In this interview, Swanzy discusses how security is implemented in his 148-school district in the aftermath of the Columbine tragedy two-and-a-half years ago, and how he has spent the interim helping his community heal.

Hava Leisner: What changes in physical security have occurred at Columbine High School since the tragic shooting two-and-a-half-years ago?

Jack Swanzy: Columbine is a school that is in a higher socio-economic level so its philosophy as a suburban high school is probably different than what you would find in an urban high school. Historically, in our county, there have been a lot of keys available for teachers and staff to have the right to come and go at all hours and on weekends.

Since Columbine happened, especially at that high school, we started restricting access into the buildings. In any large high school-this building has about 230,000 square feet-there are a number of access points in and out of the building. We have restricted access to the building, reducing to five the number of locations people can enter the school. We have probably 30 to 40 doors overall. Doors are still available for exiting but anyplace that people enter is a controlled point. All of those access points are monitored by camera. From a security location we can watch who is coming and who is going.

HL: Are those continuously running cameras?

JS: Yes.

HL: Are the images stored for long periods of time?

JS: They go through a multiplexer and they are stored and kept for 30 days.

HL: Are they stored on magnetic tape or videocassette?

JS: They are on video right now. The system has the capability of going to other types of systems because it is all-digital. And you have to know upfront my philosophy on cameras: they don’t do you any good, all they do is record history. They don’t give you any security. If honest people know that they are on camera they will be more honest. But it does not prevent a Columbine massacre from happening.

Other points: we took all of the exterior access keys away and went to a proxy card system, where the cards are like credit cards. They are set up such that they have expiration dates on them and when people use the card to come in, they wave it in front of a sensor-it will unlock the door, it will record who used it, it will record the time and, then in off-hours, the cameras, which may not be running, will come on and record who is walking in.

There also is an administrative part to security that has to be implemented. The administration has to set some rules about how people use the system and if any of those rules aren’t followed then you basically have a security system that isn’t working the way it should. Any time you introduce something new into a community that hasn’t had it before, you end up with resistance so it takes some time. Things are not instantaneously perfect. The access proxy cards are set up such that if you haven’t checked out once you have come into the building within off hours, your card goes inactive within 24 hours.

HL: So keys are completely eliminated?

JS: Any exterior entrance key is eliminated. We still have keys for the teachers to access their rooms and for the storage spaces and for offices and things like that. That is still done with keys, but the only way to enter the building when it is closed is to have a proxy card that records exactly who is there. If somebody loans out their proxy card and something happens within the building, that is not to cool. Whoever lent their card, we’ve got them.

HL: But aren’t they being videotaped?

JS: Yes. Things are happening several different ways. This all pertains to the normal kinds of things-in most schools you have theft situations, you have vandalism, those are the big issues. We have cameras running throughout the day for other reasons, for example to keep the fights down in the cafeteria. If there’s a discipline issue or if there’s a fight or something like that and the area is being monitored then some disciplinary things can happen. If somebody props an exterior door open so that the football team can come in and out of the weight room and somebody forgets to close the door, we know there is a propped-open door, something is not right, and someone can come and do something about it. We also know who propped it open.

When there are a couple thousand kids in a building and you have a couple hundred staff members and then a certain number of volunteers, we’re talking about a facility that has to be flexible. When you have lots of comings and goings, and there are a million things going on-as it should be in a high school-you still have to make sure you have a guarded perimeter. Our high schools are not ever to be thought of as fortresses, they are community centers and we encourage a lot of community use. It is difficult to design something that makes everyone feel 100 percent secure yet allows for a lot of flexibility. I think that the district has come to the conclusion that “yes” you can do certain things to your buildings to harden them against people attacking, but you can’t prevent it.

We looked at metal detectors and we had a lot of companies give us metal detectors. That doesn’t fit with our district’s philosophy and it takes an enormous amount of time and staff to bring 2,000 students through metal detectors. And as happened in Washington, D.C., at the capital building, if somebody really wants to make an attack on your building you’ll end up with two armed guards lying dead over your metal detector.

HL: So none of the schools have metal detectors?

JS: We don’t use metal detectors for the reason that it is one of those things that has never been used in our district and it is not part of a mindset that is acceptable to our community. It also doesn’t fit with how our community views the schools. Now we certainly could build schools that have a higher level of security in them and we could make them more jail-like and we could harden them up. That design technique is well known out there, but the other half of it is what is acceptable in the community you work in.

The thing we needed to have happen, as it undoubtedly didn’t happen during or right before the Columbine incident, is a higher awareness of students. If they heard something, they need to be able to talk to adults about the things they heard their peers saying. There has to be a higher awareness among everybody that bullying is a big national issue in every school district. And when things like that happen, there needs to be enough resources in schools, enough counselors to identify kids who have these issues or problems, and some way to actively intervene and work with those kids so they understand that bullying is not acceptable. At this point in our culture, it is just not “cool,” you might say, to go and talk to an adult about your peers. I think an awareness within young people that they need to take their own personal security seriously as well as the security of their friends, is important. And I think we are seeing that happen in our school district. Kids are more aware; when they hear or see something they have to not fear letting somebody know about it.

The other thing is to have more adults in our buildings. There are resource officers from our police departments with more visibility. We had them there, they were on site right when things were happening during that tragic day. We also have security people in the building and their job is to walk the halls and be accessible to kids and actually know the student population. They aren’t official police, they aren’t armed. But we have those people there if fights are breaking out. That awareness was there and those people were there before; I would say there is probably more of them now. There are more resource officers from various police departments in the buildings.

HL: And, are they armed?

JS: They are. The resource officers are full policemen. They are not present within the schools 100 percent of the time but they are there a lot and get to know the kids. They might be assigned to several schools-they may visit a high school and they may visit an elementary school-but their exposure and people knowing about them is important. Those officers were there from the very beginning. I don’t know them personally, but I do know that after working within this community for two and a half years, that these are not remote people, these are real human beings, just like you and I.

HL: Do you think, in your many years of experience in designing facilities and planning, that the large size of Columbine with 2,000 students relates to safety?

JS: I am very much a proponent of smaller school designs. However, you have the reality of budgets and money and administration.

The more kids you have the better budgets you have. About 2,000 kids in one school seems to be something we can handle and our administration likes, and the curriculum and budgeting seems to work.

There are a lot of administrative things that can be used to “break down” bigger structures-creating teacher teams, for example, who are responsible for smaller groups of students so it basically becomes a school within a school. That philosophy helps break down large structures and large masses of kids, creating more manageable and more personalized schools.

HL: How would teachers communicate if there was a problem in their area? Are there duress alarms or any type of emergency buttons?

JS: Every classroom has phones; there is an interior phone system. There is a P.A. system throughout. There are a lot of radios, there are resource officers, security people, and others. Everybody who is mobile has a radio. Communication within the building is very good.

HL: So, if a staff member picked up that phone it would go to some administrative hub?

JS: Yes. It would go to the main administrative office. They can either dial directly out, they can hit a couple of buttons and be at any of the other areas around the school, or at the administrative offices. If they needed to call 911 they certainly could do that straight out.

HL: In addition to eliminating blind spots in hallways, some architects are using fixed partitions in lieu of bathrooms doors, similar to what you might see in an airport restroom. They are also using cubbyholes instead of lockers. Have any of those measures been considered in your district?

JS: We use a lot of door-less bathrooms, that design has been a stock item for years. In Columbine, all of the bathrooms are set up that way and have been for years. We do have lockers in the building. The administration didn’t feel like it needed to change that. We just recently added a few more lockers. It is always a debate whether or not to have lockers.

We have a school district to the south of us here, Douglas County, and they have decided not to put lockers in any of their facilities any longer. All of the kids carry backpacks. Douglas County is a growing area, and not using lockers saves them money and eliminates some of the noise from the hallways.

Our school district is not new; it’s been one school district for 51 years now. And before that, it was 39 individual school districts. There is a long history of using lockers in the Jefferson County School District. At this point we haven’t sensed much of an outcry in having locker so we are still using them.

HL: When was Columbine built?

JS: It was originally built in 1971 or 1972 and had a major renovation in 1995.

HL: In terms of safety and security, what do you think has been learned in your 36 years as an architect in terms of educational settings?

JS: That more kids drive to school. Security surrounding how to move kids on site is one of the bigger issues. Every time someone turns sixteen, it is almost a God-given right that they have a car. And they think that they have to drive to school.

When you have buildings that are fifty years old-fifty years ago you didn’t have kids driving their cars-you have a big security issue. How to properly handle that is something we’re constantly working on. So traffic flow is a major safety issue.

There are just natural things in the design concept you should be doing-you don’t want nooks and crannies, you don’t want bushes next to your building, you want good lighting, you want to be able to control the amount of access going in and out of your building, you want to know who is coming and going, and you want to put enough people and adults in there so there are enough eyes watching. It takes good budgets-and you can’t stress that enough. You also have to be able to create a cultural change with how kids grow up so it’s OK to report a peer.

You have to have cultural sensitivity and you also need to have a lot of good counselors out there who know how to handle these situations.

HL: Is it correct that some type of Threat Assessment Manual was coming to your district?

JS: Yes, we have a manual prepared by specialists. We not only have a threat assessment manual but also an emergency preparedness manual. We had some of these before, but they were never at a very polished level and now they are. There is a lot more emergency training for staff, teaching what to do and how to do it. There are processes in place so if this happens you do “this,” and if that happens, you do “that.”

I think a lot of lessons were learned in Columbine. When you have a major catastrophe and police move in, you quickly lose control of your site and your building. And the on-site administrators really get pushed to the side because the police take over and secure things. Once you have situations where administrators are moved off your site, you don’t have control of what is going on and you don’t know where your people are and you don’t know how to direct things. I think the possibility of losing that control needs to be evaluated within the threat assessment. Nobody ever thought we could ever have an emergency of this magnitude.

HL: Is there anything in terms of safety and security that you think is being overlooked by architects designing facilities today?

JS: I think that design architects working for school districts have to spend enough time learning the district’s culture and learning the district’s security needs. Most school districts, especially bigger ones, have educational specifications and, while that is what we want and need, there are security aspects and specifications that also need to be determined. How they go about doing that and the philosophy of security and the philosophy of the community certainly needs to be felt by the architects. Once they learn what that philosophy is and what that culture is, they will be able to better reflect those needs in their designs. Are there things missing? I guess only history will say.