SALT LAKE CITY — A Michigan town built its newest high school with a goal in mind — help prevent mass casualties if there is ever a school shooting.
Fruitport, Michigan designed its new Fruitport High School with curved hallways and half-walls with the aim of protecting students, teachers and staff during school shootings, according to The Washington Post.
The school includes barriers that offer cover for students. Other short walls can break off a shooter’s straightforward approach. The school also includes “meticulously spaced classrooms that can lock on demand and hide students in the corner, out of a killer’s sight,” The Washington Post reports.
The construction project cost $48 million.
“If I go to FPH and I want to be an active shooter, I’m going in knowing I have reduced sightlines,” Fruitport Superintendent Bob Szymoniak told The Washington Post. “It has reduced his ability to do harm.”
And, yes, the mass shootings from the last decade inspired the overhaul of the school building. Szymoniak told The Washington Post that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida drove the need for the school’s changes.
But the changes also speak to a wider national change in how students approach their school life. As of April 2018, 57% of U.S. teens are worried that a shooting could happen in their school, according to the Pew Research Center.
That’s why Fruitport instituted the changes, and why other companies have reworked the little things associated with school to prevent and prepare for these shootings.
For example, I’ve written before about how bulletproof backpacks have been on the rise with the increase in school shootings. In 2018, Office Depot and Home Depot started selling bulletproof backpacks in the immediate aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting. And, more recently, The New York Times reported that there’s been an increase in bulletproof backpack sales, especially in the wake of the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
Jeffco Public Schools in Jefferson County, Colorado, have given teachers buckets, kitty litter and Sharpie markers in case of a school shooting, according to The Denver Post.
The buckets and kitty litter can be used instead of toilets if students are stuck in a lockdown situation for too long. The Sharpies are used by “teachers to write the time they applied a tourniquet to a bleeding student, so paramedics know how long it’s been on,” according to The Denver Post.
But students don’t necessarily see changes to their backpacks and school design as a quick fix. “...when it comes to what can be done to prevent this kind of violence, far more teens view proposals focused on mental illness, assault-style weapon bans and the use of metal detectors in schools as potentially effective than say the same about allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns in schools,” according to the Pew Research Center.