More active shooter drills. Safe rooms. Bulletproof backpacks. The American classroom is changing.
With the rising number of school shootings and a lack of meaningful legislation to curb gun violence, schools and parents are attempting to take safety into their own hands.
Gun violence has changed day-to-day life in and out of the classroom, with more time and resources being funneled into preparing for worst-case scenarios.
While some school districts invest in additional safety measures, such as easy-to-exit emergency windows, some parents are adding bulletproof backpacks to their children’s back-to-school shopping lists.
This year, at least 37 shootings were reported on K-12 school grounds, according to a CNN data analysis as of September 19. There were at least 16 others on university and college campuses.
With the exception of 2020 — when schools largely switched to online learning — school shootings have become more frequent nationwide. More than 300 have been reported since 2018, according to CNN’s analysis.
“I've come to terms with the fact that I might die in my classroom,” said Briana Takhtani, a seventh-grade teacher in Middlesex County, New Jersey. “School was a good place to be a kid, and it just feels like that's kind of changing.”
In light of rising gun violence, classroom fixtures — such as door locks and windows — have been upgraded to increase security.
Here are some items that educators across the country say have been installed in their schools that may seem ordinary but serve a hidden purpose.
Door window covers
The day after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022, first-grade teacher Melissa Parrish said her school in Los Angeles conducted a lockdown drill.
“They had us cover any windows that would be exposed in the classroom,” she said. “Then we just turned off the lights and just sat silently.”
Parrish said she did her best to both comfort her young students and be honest with them.
“A lot of them were very scared. And I didn't feel comfortable saying, ‘Well, this will never happen here’ because you just don't know,” she said. “But they’re also 7 so you want to reassure them that they’re in a safe environment.”
Across the country in Raleigh, North Carolina, fourth-grade teacher Sara Andrews said her school also conducts drills with similar protocols including covering classroom windows with paper or cloth.
“I tell my kids this is a really safe building, and we're doing these lockdown drills to keep [them] safe,” she said. “However, it's such a heavy burden to sit with 9- and 10-year-olds huddling against the wall.”
Whiteboard safe rooms
One Alabama school is test-piloting a new security feature in two classrooms – bulletproof whiteboards that turn into a safe room. These floor-to-ceiling whiteboards lie flat against the wall until the safe room needs to be deployed. Within seconds, the panels can be converted into a bulletproof room that can be locked from the inside.
The inventor, Kevin Thomas, told CNN that school safety was never a business he intended to get into.
“I can't make laws, I can't change legislation,” said Thomas, founder and CEO of KT Security Solutions. “But what I can do is build these panels, and I can have them installed in schools. And I can give [children] an opportunity to go home to their loved ones tonight.”
Bullet-resistant windows that double as emergency exits
In January 2017, a student at West Liberty-Salem High School in Ohio stepped onto campus and opened fire — shooting and seriously wounding a classmate. About 400 students evacuated through their classroom windows, West Liberty-Salem Local School District Superintendent Kraig Hissong told CNN.
“They just kicked out or broke out those windows.”
Since then, the school has undergone a number of changes to upgrade security. The high school has removed window screens and installed emergency exit windows with levers that students can access from the inside — to make it easier to make another escape if necessary.
To protect students from an active shooter trying to get inside a classroom from outside the building, the district has also installed bullet-resistant film on classroom windows.
“If somebody tries to shoot out a window [to get inside], the bullets will pass through, but they won't shatter the window,” he said. “It won't keep [the shooter] out forever, but two minutes allows the police or first responders to be able to get there.”
Bulletproof backpacks
Bulletproof backpacks, often made with polyethylene fiber — a flexible material that can provide ballistic protection when woven tightly — are becoming increasingly common. Yasir Sheikh, president of Guard Dog Security, a manufacturer of bulletproof backpacks, said sales have increased steadily over the past decade.
“After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, we started getting some inquiries about school safety products,” said Sheikh. “Parents are looking for some sort of solution for their children.”
Kevin Lim, founder of Bulletproof Zone, a retailer specializing in body armor and bulletproof products like backpacks, said he noticed a similar trend after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.
“Overnight there were a ton of orders for these ballistic backpacks.”
Several companies also sell bulletproof backpack inserts. A standard insert from Bulletproof Zone is 11 by 14 inches and weighs about 1.5 pounds.
Auto-locking doors
Andrews said propping doors open is a thing of the past at her school in North Carolina, where most doors now lock automatically.
“[Doors are] automatically locking and then you have a key card to get in,” she told CNN. “Stepping foot on campus in general has become a more complicated process.”
“Now you stand at the front door, you have the video camera look at you if you're a visitor, you get buzzed in by the secretary,” Andrews said.
Hannah Lee, a high school English teacher in Irvine, California, who started her career during the Covid-19 pandemic, said she thinks frequently about how she would barricade her door or what she would do if a shooter broke through her door lock.
“I'm a young teacher and sometimes I wonder, is it going to be the best right now?” she said. “Will it just get worse and harder?”
Lee isn’t the only one questioning her future as a teacher. With school shootings on the rise and pandemic-disrupted learning taking a toll on teachers who feel increasingly burned out, public education is struggling to attract — and retain — qualified school staff, said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the country.
Gun rights activists have long proposed arming teachers to combat school shootings. Most educators, however, say putting guns in teachers’ hands isn’t the answer. More than half of US teachers believe being armed would make schools less safe, according to a recent survey from the RAND Corporation.
“I'm already a babysitter, a mother, a mental health counselor,” said Takhtani. “I don't want to be a police officer.”
Through incremental changes, this is how schools across the country have responded to the worsening gun epidemic.
This is the new American classroom.
