AURORA | It took only minutes for schools across Aurora to go into lockdown after the first reports emerged of a shooting at Arapahoe High School on Dec. 13.
Shortly after news of tragic violence started coming out of Centennial, officials from the Cherry Creek School District declared a “secure perimeter” at all of the district schools. Exterior doors were locked as classes continued as normal inside the buildings. Aurora Public Schools lifted their own official status of “lockdown” only after they confirmed the news that the shooter at Arapahoe was dead.
That rapid response to an incident miles away in a different school district was no accident.
“It’s something that we train on and that the schools are required to practice,” said Randy Councell, Cherry Creek’s director of safety and security. He added that the lockdown status came after recommendations from the Aurora Police Department. “You just make the announcement and the people in the building know exactly what they need to do.”
But Councell and other school security officials are the first to admit that brand of preparation only goes so far when it comes to these kinds of tragedies.
The Columbine High School shootings in 1999 were very different than the attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in 2012. The most recent shooting, at Arapahoe, had its own distinct profile — a lone student entered the school through an unlocked back door armed with a shotgun, a machete, explosives and more than 100 rounds of shotgun ammunition. His attack, which killed student Claire Davis, lasted less than two minutes.
Responding to such attacks can involve just as much improvisation as training. For example, the shooter at Arapahoe set off Molotov cocktails in the library that triggered the fire alarm. Unlike other school shootings, that alarm wasn’t a decoy set to get students and teachers out into the hallway. Instructing students, teachers and staff how to respond to such a circumstance correctly isn’t always straightforward.
“Take a look. Do you see smoke? If you don’t, stay where you’re at,” Councell said. “These are scenarios that we share with the principals every year.”
Those scenarios are pulled from real tragedies. In drills and training exercises, security personnel take cues from as many factual situations as possible.
“Whenever there’s an event that occurs, whether it’s Arapahoe or Sandy Hook, there are always lessons learned,” said Anthony Sturges, chief operating officer at Aurora Public Schools. “They’re similar, but they’re always really unique in other ways.”
Almost 15 years after Columbine, that uncertainty is still what makes school security so challenging. Every one of these tragedies offers its own grim lessons. No amount of study or preparation can cover every scenario or make every building completely secure.
That kind of uncertainty continues to stoke a debate about security and preparation that’s raged since Columbine. Last year, Republican Sen. Ted Harvey led a failed push in the state Legislature to allow school districts to let staff carry concealed weapons. He’s renewed the call for action in the weeks following the attack at Arapahoe High School.
Neither school board has taken an official position on that failed push for legislation, and likely wouldn’t until the law successfully made its way through the state Legislature. For now, the task of security falls to the districts’ security teams, as well as School Resource Officers, police officers assigned to specific schools. In the years since Columbine, APS and Cherry Creek have drawn on increasingly complex and specific approaches for securing their buildings.
“I became a SRO in Cherry Creek in ’94. It was more on the community relations side. We met with kids and with parents. It was more of a community liaison role,” Councell said. “After Columbine, we shifted to a focus on safety and security. We were asked to help out with assessments and building plans.”
APS’ Emergency Response Team draws on GPS systems, online maps and wireless technology to track emergencies ranging from those like Arapahoe to the fallout from the 2012 Century theater shooting. Along with that up-to-the-minute response system, the district employs a rigorous schedule of emergency drills.
“We are required to do 10 fire drills, two lockdown drills, one tornado drill,” said Tudy Wicks, security director for the district. “We also conduct surprise drills. Last year, we put every building in the district in a red lockdown at the same time.
“We’re going to do another one this year.”
Cherry Creek also relies on large-scale drills to guide its district-wide security policy. But real-world tragedies end up shaping the security policy in these districts as well.
Following the shootings in Newtown in 2012, police officers, SWAT team members and security experts toured every one of the more than 60 buildings in the Cherry Creek School District. They reviewed doors and electronic locks at elementary schools. They looked at security camera systems and window strength at middle schools and high schools. They even went through the district’s stadiums and administrative buildings.
Those safety inspections affected how $3 million was used in upgrading security across the district. The money, approved by voters as part of a larger $125 million bond election issue, went toward better security camera systems as well as more basic upgrades to doors and windows.
“We are always looking at ways to improve our plans,” Councell said.
But as the most recent attack at Arapahoe High showed, such physical security measures aren’t always applicable when it comes to a troubled student finding access to a building. Both districts have dedicated more resources to tracking students’ mental health, a task that’s just as daunting as strengthening doors and ramping up building security. With the budgets for local organizations like Aurora Mental Health and Arapahoe/Douglas Mental Health stretched thin, it falls to the districts’ relatively small staff of counselors and psychologists to track the mental stability of thousands of students across all grade levels.
“More and more often, kids are going through personal traumas,” said Ronald Lee, director of Mental Health Services at Cherry Creek. “We’re handling more personal issues. It’s not just the stereotype of a young teenager breakup. We’re seeing tougher things, and they’re happening at an earlier age.”
That makes for a prevention approach that’s more complex than metal detectors or ID cards. Apart from the price tag, posting guards and metal detectors at every school could do more harm than good.
“We want a balance between being prepared and preparing them to such a point that they don’t feel safe,” Cherry Creek Spokeswoman Tustin Amole said.
Officials from both districts say finding a way to keep track on students’ mental health is just as critical as a building’s doors and windows. From finding ways to monitor social media to encouraging reporting from other students, prevention goes deeper than police officers and SWAT teams.
“A lot of times, the kids are going to talk to other kids about how angry they are,” Wicks said. “Whether it be in person, or social media, I think more kids are coming forward so that action can be taken.”
That’s part of a solution to a threat that denies logic and, by its nature, defies perfect preparation.
“It’s a hard thing, it’s something that we’ve got to be realistic and deal with. I feel confident that our staff has worked hard on it,” said APS Board Member Mary Lewis, adding that building security is only a final component of the issue. “I think that we have to do a better job as a society getting anyone who needs mental health treatment the mental health treatment that we need. “That includes children,” she added.
Reach reporter Adam Goldstein at 720-449-9707 or agoldstein@aurorasentinel.com
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