Attitudes toward safety at Evanston Township High School have shifted from “reactive” to “proactive” in the 10 years since the Columbine shooting, said Frank Kaminski, director of safety at ETHS.
“Our whole response to schools changed after Columbine,” Kaminski said. “I would venture to say that all of our plans in the last 10 years have been refined and reviewed.”
At the time of the shooting, Kaminski was chief of the Evanston Police Department. He said the incident sparked radical changes in security protocol within the high school and EPD.
Prior to the 1999 tragedy in Jefferson County, Colo., the plan for a school shooting was for a SWAT team to create a perimeter around the building and wait to enter, Kaminski said.
“Now when there’s an active shooter we (plan to) go in right away,” he said. “All those rules of engagement have changed.”
The state government now requires schools to complete additional drills that mimic evacuation and lockdown situations, Kaminski said. He said one of the safety department’s most important tactics is communication between the students, faculty and staff to ensure preparedness. The school now has a color-coded warning system and the ETHS community is well-versed in which actions correspond to each color.
“They just say ‘code red,’ and we all know what to do,” said ETHS student Hannah Melto, 16. “Blinds closed, door locked, lights out, everyone huddled in a corner.”
Melto said the school’s security guards are familiar, friendly and responsive to students’ concerns.
“There was a fighting incident a while ago in one of the hallways and now they patrol there a lot more,” Melto said. “They’re pretty good at figuring out where the blind spots are.”
The safety department also focuses more on preventing incidences from ever occurring by relying on “good information and good intelligence,” Kaminski said. To this end, the security department holds a monthly meeting with “a lot of the key people in the building” to discuss students and situations with the potential to become violent.
“There’s no exact profile, so we just look for themes in situations where we’d have to intervene,” Kaminski said.
An emerging theme among school shooters is a sense of isolation from the school community, which is rooted in earlier education, said Jesper Stelter-Hogh, 17.
“I was bullied a lot between kindergarten and 7th grade,” he said. “After that, most people stopped caring, and I stopped responding, but for a while I was really violent. I lashed out a lot.”
Educators are making a more conscious effort to discipline bullying and recognize signs of depression or violent behavior, said Michael Conran, principal of Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School. The K-8 magnet school feeds into ETHS.
“If kids look violent or depressed, we don’t hesitate to bring in the parents,” Conran said. “I guarantee you we’re not desensitized to anything.”
Conran said the school can often evaluate the students’ emotions from the contents of their writing, which educators take far more seriously now than in the past.
“Back in the ’70s and ’80s it would be just kids being kids,” Conran said. “Now, when you look at the writings of these child killers in the public schools, a lot of that ideation was documented.”
