Written by senior Marissa Amerine

Safety was never a concern, until recently. There is no such thing as a perfect set of procedures that can guarantee no incidents happen, nonetheless we should still strive for better safety for our students.

The Flaws

According to the article, “Here’s How School Security Should Be Improved in 4 Easy Steps,” one of the main causes for the school shootings we see plastered all over the front of our daily newspapers is too many access points to the school.  

“Schools must have limited points of entry (one or at most two), each of which should be monitored and controlled by personnel that can turn people away when needed,” Dr. Steven P. Bucci said.

When looking at the A and B building of the school as one big facility, it is easy to see that we have many different entrances to the school, with only a few being supervised.

Greater Altoona Career and Technology Center students come back to the high school half way through the day. Many students attend the GACTC, therefore, there is a large amount of students walking through the doors at the same time. For the sake of time and energy, the greeters at the school checkpoint do not search the students coming back into the school. This is a security concern due to the fact that the large masses of students can make it easy to conceal a person’s entry who does not belong to our school.

How to Improve

When the question at large is how to keep our students safe, it is important to make sure our administration is doing all they can to ensure our safety.

Research might be one of the most helpful resources when trying to make a lasting change to our school security system.

Looking at all of the school shootings that took place in 2018 and asking about the catalysts that lead to such catastrophic conclusions might be the key to cutting down on these outrageous acts of violence. In the future, we should be paying close attention to specific details, like secured locked doors.