The day after last week’s mass shooting at a Florida high school, the Harvard School Building Committee held a regularly scheduled meeting, and security measures for the proposed new elementary school were a significant part of the discussion.
At the Feb. 15 meeting, committee member SusanMary Redinger said she had reviewed the plans for closed-circuit television cameras and keycard or key fob access during school hours. She asked architect Emily Grandstaff-Rice what other features would contribute to safety for children and teachers in the building.
School planners now assume that violent events may occur anywhere, and Grandstaff-Rice said best practices today are geared toward security. For one thing, windowsills are set higher, so that someone outside the building does not have a direct view of the students inside. Every classroom has an intentional blindspot—an area not visible from the window in the room’s door—as a possible refuge.
Grandstaff-Rice said Harvard Police Chief Ed Denmark had suggested several ways to raise the level of protection. He recommended having twice as many CCTV cameras as the designers had specified and also that the cameras and electronic door locks be available to police via the internet. With that access, he told the Press in a brief conversation, the police—with school administrators’ approval—could lock down specific parts of the school or unlock others from outside the building in an emergency. He described it as a “belt-and-suspenders” measure. He also said police should receive an alert if a door at the school is left unlocked or is propped open.
On a different safety issue, project manager Tom Murphy from the firm NV5 reported that water pressure tests indicate that the proposed school may need a fire pump and a generator to run it. A contingency of $400,000 for those items was included in the cost estimates reported two weeks ago, as part of the budget proposed for the town vote.
