School Safety, 10 Years After Columbine

Anne Marie Hochhalter pictured in her home in Westminster, Colo. (Video)

Columbine High School

Much of the shooting took place in Columbine High School's library which has been renovated.

Columbine's renovated cafeteria.

"To me, these interviews were a wake-up call," Modzeleski says. "We often talk about schools not having money for metal detectors or other security equipment. I'm not going to sit here and say those things are not important at all. But one of the things that is significant, doesn't cost a thing, and can help prevent a school shooting is forging connections between schools and kids. This is a must for every school."

One of the most important measures of whether a school has developed connections with its students, according to the Center for Social and Emotional Education, is school climate, another term for the overall quality of the students' lives at school. Factors that can influence a decline in school climate include bullying and student isolation from personal connections with teachers. Jonathan Cohen, president and cofounder of the CSEE, a New York-based nonprofit that focuses on school social environments, has researched the implications of positive and negative school climate and has found a correlation between positive, well-connected school climates and increased academic achievement and decreased school violence.

Although many school officials are in favor of making school climate a priority to reap the benefits of this correlation, some do not measure it properly, Cohen says. "Homegrown school climate tools are no good," he says. "When we don't measure properly, we inadvertently become blind to how safe or not safe and how connected or not connected our students feel."

Though school shootings are tragic and memorable, they are also occur relatively infrequently and account for just 1 percent of the homicides of school-age youth, according to the Secret Service and the Department of Education research. Because it is unreasonable to expect that schools are capable of preventing every single one of these rare acts, another key piece of keeping students safe at school is a school's ability to minimize the mayhem caused by a school shooting through regular practice of crisis management plans. Many schools have excellent plans on paper, says school safety and security expert Kenneth Trump, but few schools run drills to practice and test the plans or update them frequently enough to be sure they would be relevant if a school shooting occurred.

Trump says students will be safer if schools do little things like running evacuation and lockdown drills once a month, ensuring everyone in the school community knows how to dial 911 from the building, and checking to see if school officials have keys to the building listed on paper as the emergency evacuation site. Trump, who formerly handled school security for districts in and near Cleveland and now works as president of a school safety consultation agency, added that part of schools' waning interest in practicing and updating their crisis management plans is the amount of time that has passed since Columbine. Today's high school sophomores were in kindergarten when the Columbine shootings took place, and today's superintendents, teachers and school staff may not have had their current jobs on April 20, 1999. The further away from Columbine we get, Trump says, the easier it is for administrators to believe a shooting can't happen in their school because it has not happened there before, a hope that Columbine should have proved wrong.

No one is more familiar with such a false sense of security than Columbine High School Principal Frank DeAngelis. This is his 13th year as principal and 30th year as an educator at the school. High percentages of Columbine's students graduate and go on to college, and parents are heavily involved in their children's school experiences, yet until the Virginia Tech massacre, Columbine was the site of the worst school shooting in the nation's history. "No one is immune to tragedy," DeAngelis says. "Your community is just like mine."

Since the shootings, Columbine has taken steps to make the school safer. DeAngelis says students have followed through on his request to report alarming behavior to adults or through the school's anonymous tip box. He says he helps maintain a positive school climate by personally getting to know students in small groups, a task that begins each year during the first few days of school. Columbine has surveillance equipment to continuously monitor entryways and hallways. But all of the work DeAngelis has done since April 20, 1999, to protect the school doesn't mean he has put the shootings behind him.