Lockdown High. Annette Fuentes

climate that fostered bullying of less popular students. Most people think the place must be a fortress with state-of-the-art antibullying programs and conflict resolution training. And they’d be wrong. Columbine High School has no metal detectors. Zero. There are a few more surveillance cameras, but there had been some in place before April 20, 1999. School resource officers? Still one SRO, same as before. Three new positions were added—campus supervisors, unarmed middle-aged men who walk around the campus. All but two entry doors are locked now, but the campus is not closed and students come and go freely during lunchtime and breaks.

      On the Friday afternoon I visited Columbine High, school was over and clusters of students lingered outside the main entrance and inside the lobby. I walked through the unlocked front doors, which displayed a sign stating that the school was “protected by V-Soft,” a computer software program that scans visitor IDs to detect registered sex offenders. Another sign instructs all visitors to stop at the main office. There was no adult presence at the entrance, and no one questioned me as I walked in. The office was bustling with students, teachers, and staff preparing for the next day’s fifth annual Community Day, an event created to “give back to the community” that had rallied to help the school post–April 20, 1999. Over several e-mails and phone calls with his secretary, Principal DeAngelis had agreed to grant me a one-hour interview after school hours to discuss safety and security at Columbine, a large, two-story, multiwing campus with about 1,700 students. Businesslike but cordial, he ushered me into his office and talked about April 20 and school security as if he’d done it a hundred times before. He has. What did he do to create a sense of safety in the building after the tragedy? “I think we have surveillance camera systems second to none that we can access via our Blackberries,” he explains. “Campus supervisors can be anywhere in the building and can have access to what’s happening throughout the school. We have keyless entries. We have two entrances into the building that are open during the day. The one you just walked in and the one downstairs, and we have staff members monitoring them. All the other doors, when we’re locked down, are keyless entries. So if a key was to be lost—if this card was to be lost [holding a card on a lanyard around his neck]—it’s all tied into a computer system, so we can deactivate it. I’m the only that has twenty-four/seven access, along with our custodial person. Every period of the day we have adult supervision. So there are teachers during their planning periods that either monitor the doors downstairs or walk the halls upstairs.”

      Jefferson County School District, of which Columbine is part, created threat-assessment teams that in each school began to identify students who posed potential risks. DeAngelis says he has used the process several times successfully, starting with his school social worker and moving up to the district level if action is warranted. Columbine devised an emergency response plan, and each semester it practices evacuations and lockdowns, he says, “and we talk to teachers about assignments, and are there red flags.” People always ask him why there are no metal detectors, DeAngelis says, and he poses his own question. “Would metal detectors have stopped Klebold and Harris? They would not. When they came on campus, we had a Jefferson [County] police officer who was armed. He exchanged gunfire. They drove into the parking lot. They’re not gonna stop at the metal detector and go through. They came in blasting,” he says. “A lot of times metal detectors are false security, and the presence of that security system, or the metal detector—is it really gonna stop another school shooting? Not necessarily. And then you look at the practicality of it. A month after the shooting at Columbine, President Clinton came to Dakota Ridge High School to address us, and all because of security reasons, all the people had to go through metal detectors. And it was an hour. Do we do that every day with students and make them go through metal detectors? It’s still a place to educate students, and do students, and do parents, want a fortress?”

      The Columbine community considered that question, and so did the Columbine Review Commission. It rejected the high-tech fortress approach to making Colorado schools safer, noting the limitations of metal detectors and other hardware: “Although security devices can effectively deter certain forms of school crimes, including theft, graffiti and gang violence, they have not yet proven to be cost effective in preventing major school violence like that experienced by Columbine High School. Therefore, the Commission does not recommend the universal installation of metal detectors, video surveillance cameras and other security equipment as a means of forestalling violence generally; for the present, such devices can serve only to offer transient solutions to specific problems at individual schools.”¹³

      The commission also offered prescriptions for addressing conditions in a school that could foster a Columbine-type incident. One called for changing what it termed the “code of silence” in student culture to encourage reporting potential threats from classmates. Another recommendation homed in on bullying, which the commission stated was either a huge problem at Columbine or not very significant, based on contradictory testimony it heard from parents, students, and Principal DeAngelis. Acknowledging that bullying was a “risk factor” for school violence, the commission urged every Colorado school to adopt proven antibullying programs. Under Principal DeAngelis, the student-informer model found traction while bullying prevention hasn’t. At Columbine, students are educated that it’s “safe to tell” on one another, DeAngelis says, and to that end he has an anonymous tip box. “I can’t tell you the number of tips I get in my office about ‘You may want to check so-and-so, he may have drugs,’ or ‘You may want to check so-and-so, who may have a weapon.’ That’s what the key is,” he says. “It’s very difficult for these kids to narc or rat on someone but at least give them the skills to put an anonymous tip in my tip box.” DeAngelis had no statistics on the number of tips that were substantiated, but Columbine High’s state profile indicates a school most administrators would consider trouble-free. For the 2005–2006 school year, fifteen drug-related incidents, eleven alcohol incidents, and one dangerous weapon (unspecified) were reported. No assaults or fights were reported, but there were ninety-eight other violations of the code of conduct, and a total of five expulsions—this from a population of 1,677 teenagers.¹⁴