Mass shootingsMass shootings influenced school architecture long before Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick questioned entrances and exits

By Brandon Formby

Published 24 May 2018

Architects and school safety experts say that campuses are already designed with minimizing death in mind — but that architecture can only go so far.

As Texans grappled with being the site of America’s latest mass school shooting last week and the seemingly insoluble arguments over gun rights and student safety again flared, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick suggested that preventing future deaths could be a matter of rethinking how schools are built and operated.

“We may have to look at the design of our schools moving forward and retrofitting schools that are already built,” he said. “And what I mean by that is there are too many entrances and too many exits to our over 8,000 campuses in Texas.”

But the state’s public schools have long been designed with the possibility of mass murder in mind.

“Particularly since we’ve seen the rise of school shootings,” said James Perry, executive vice president of the Texas Society of Architects. “It’s always a topic at large conventions.”

Still, architecture and school safety experts say, there are limits to what inanimate buildings can do to minimize or prevent casualties — especially when the shooter is a student and has easy access to their intended targets.

“That changes the game completely,” said Christopher Huckabee, CEO of Huckabee Inc., an architecture firm based in Fort Worth that’s been designing schools for decades.

Gov. Greg Abbott this week convened a series of roundtable discussions about protecting students. A school architect was among the panelists, and after one meeting, Abbott echoed Patrick’s statements about looking at entrances and exits. But it’s unclear what other aspects of campus design, if any, were discussed because Abbott closed the meetings to the public.

Patrick’s comments came during a press conference last week in the wake of Friday’s shooting at Santa Fe High School in southeast Texas, where a student is accused of killing eight students and two teachers and wounding others. One of Patrick’s suggestions — to have students pass through a single entrance that’s watched by law enforcement or school personnel — is already standard procedure in many school districts.

“The main entries of schools have changed over the years,” said Tim Carroll, a spokesman for the Allen school district north of Dallas, whose newer campuses have all been designed with a main entrance.