Two shootings inside 'secure schools' this week

A student was shot inside the locked doors of a school with armed guards in Ohio and a student fired a gun inside a school with entry searches including backpack checks in Louisiana.

Yesterday morning, a student unintentionally fired a handgun inside a classroom at Istrouma High in Baton Rouge, LA. The bullet struck the ceiling above the whiteboard where a teacher normally stands.

Bullet hole in the ceiling of a classroom at Istrouma High (LA)

When students fled from the classroom, the student attempted to hide the gun above a drop ceiling tile. He was able to flee from the area while the Baton Rouge Police Department’s School Drug Task Force searched room by room until they found the hidden gun in the ceiling. Like many other teens who are carrying concealed guns at school, this handgun was equipped with an illegal switch for fully automatic fire.

Istrouma High School has entry security including backpack checks. As I’ve written about for years, it’s not realistic for schools to effectively search every student’s backpack. To find a gun inside a multi-pocket bag, security staff need 2-3 minutes per bag to unload the contents and search every pocket. As they search all the pockets, they also need a workstation that is separated from the line so that if they find a gun, a student can’t grab it. This isn’t a viable security strategy because the security line to get into most schools would take 2-3 hours with this process.

If a school does an abbreviated search process, it won’t hold up in court during a lawsuit against the school if a student is shot inside. For the lawyers out there, the necessary process for bag searches is documented in the ‘DHS Public Venues Bag Search Procedures Guide’.

We have all experienced ‘security theater’ bag checks in our adult lives when we go into a stadium and a security guard pokes a stick into each woman’s purse to “check” for prohibited items. If a compact handgun was wrapped in a tissue, most screeners would miss it. At every music festival and college football game, attendees sneak in drugs and alcohol even with tiny clear bags. At a school, kids have bulky multi-compartment backpacks, athletic bags, instrument cases, and science projects (how the Apalachee school shooter snuck in an AR-15).

DHS Sports Venue Bag Search Procedures Guide

Even if the school had a perfect system for searching every student who enters the building, Istrouma High has an open campus with multiple detached buildings.

When students walk outside to move between classrooms (red circles), they can easily stop to pick-up a gun that was stashed inside a bush overnight when the campus was empty. There are nine different configurations of k-12 school campuses and each one needs a different security strategy.

For example, Istrouma High has fences between the buildings. In the middle of the night, a student could easily toss a gun over the fence and then retrieve it after going through security. I’m not giving away any secrets here because students have been sneaking guns into schools for decades.

A TSA-style screening system for this campus would require at least 9 different screening checkpoints which would be so expensive and time-consuming that it wouldn’t be a viable security solution. And this isn’t the first shooting inside a school with entry checks and armed security. Last year, there were two shootings inside the same Texas high school despite significant physical security infrastructure and armed police on campus: Second shooting at same school shows why TSA-style security doesn’t work