To The Barricades

Santa Fe Public Schools plans to use money from a recently approved bond to invest in a door barricading system for the school district, part of its broader response to a wave of national anxiety over campus shootings.

The district convened a small press conference at Santa Fe High on Tuesday morning to address what it described as "a number of questions regarding safety and security" following a mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, as well as a school shooting in Aztec, New Mexico, last December and several false threats to Santa Fe schools in recent months.

In addition to the door barricading system made by the company RhinoWare, Superintendent Veronica Garcia also says the district recently purchased an electronic visitor management system created by Raptor Technologies that requires school visitors to carry state-issued identification.

The barricading system will use $325,000 from the 2-mill levy approved by voters earlier this month, Garcia said, and will be installed in all classrooms. She expects SFPS's board of education to approve a contract with Raptor Technologies next week, and for the new monitoring system to be implemented in April.

Both tactics, Garcia believes, are "preferential" to the idea of arming teachers and other personnel in schools. That idea had not entered mainstream discourse until President Trump vaguely suggested giving bonuses to teachers who undergo arms training as a deterrent to school shootings.

Additionally, Garcia says, the school district "wants to strengthen behavioral health [and] access to social work," but did not specify how the district would do so. She says changes to security and access to resources would add another "layer of security" to the school district.

All schools are supposed to practice 11 emergency drills each year. Currently, only adults in the district undergo active-shooter training, but Garcia suggests that the board could consider whether high school and even middle school students should undergo such training.

Since 17 students were killed and 14 others wounded at a mass school shooting in Parkland several weeks ago, high school students across the country buoyed by celebrity activists have called attention to a perceived epidemic of school massacres.

Santa Fe High was the site of two scares last fall after three students there were arrested in November for allegedly plotting a shooting and charged with engaging in terrorist activity under an obscure state statute. Another man was charged with unlawfully carrying a deadly weapon on school premises later that month.

During the first scare, says Santa Fe High junior Christina Sandoval, she and others were in class when they "heard there were threats going on and [that] our school was being shot up."

"I shouldn't have to go to school and be afraid of being shot," says Sandoval, a member of the student wellness action team that unfurled anti-gun violence banners at the press conference. "It causes fear in everyone's hearts over here, and we shouldn't have to live like that at all."

She believes there should be "no guns in school at all," but was unsure whether that should exclude armed police or guards from patrolling the school during normal school hours.

"Maybe a police officer, personally I would feel more safe with one [around], but I'm not sure that everybody would," Sandoval says.

That ambivalence was echoed by other students attending the press conference, including SFHS senior Willie Weeby, who says "armed guards" in schools "take away from [students'] focus on education."

"I think every time you see an armed guard in a school, every time you know your teacher is armed, it reminds you of these other tragedies across the country and it takes away from ur education," Weeby says. "You're reminded that you can be a victim any day."

Another senior from the school, Sophia Colson, says the issue of omnipresent armed police or guards in schools is a question that students should decide together.

"It might be something we can explore, to take to the student body or student council, as something to poll the students [on], because I know students feel differently," Colson says. "It's all very difficult for us."

Both Weeby and Colson say they were proposing that their school's administration take up a campus self-surveillance program designed by family members of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012. Colson also tells SFR she is starting a club at the school for students who feel isolated from one another to connect with their peers.

"Much of the problem comes from isolation," Colson says.

Students will host a rally in SFH's plaza on March 1, and the school's theater will present a production of the Sandy Hook-inspired play 26 Pebbles at the start of the month.

Officially, neither the superintendent nor the school board have taken a position on having armed personnel in schools. But Lorraine Price, who is the board's president, disagreed with the idea of arming faculty.

"We used to have armed resourced guards paid for with a [federal] grant, he had an office right next to the principal, they kept it staffed," says Price, a former assistant principal at SFH. "But really, a kindergarten teacher with a gun strapped to her waist? Let's get real here."