Santa Fe High School Receives $10M for Security Upgrades
The school district is working toward improving access control by building a new central administration building on campus.
The Santa Fe school board voted to reallocate over $10 million in funds to build a new central administration building that will improve access control.
Most schools in the district have one entryway that stays locked at all times, other than when students are entering and exiting the building, reports Santa Fe New Mexican. Santa Fe High School was an exception.
With a 4-0 vote for security upgrades, board member Maureen Cashman says the project will allow better visibility at the Santa Fe High School campus “so we can start securing this campus and not have it be so wide open.”
Currently, the campus is too spread out, so the district’s goal is to make it more of a “closed” campus.
The money will not be taken away from other specific school projects, the board emphasized.
The first step is to demolish the existing administration building, which is set back away from the main entrance.
Gabe Romero, the district’s head of facilities and former head of security says work is expected to begin soon and completed by 2020.
This is just the first of many project the school district has planned. For example, the cafeteria is set to be moved closer to the court yard, which is at the center of the complex.
“The college-type open campus is not condutive to the security needs of a high school,” Romero said. “We’re trying to pull in some of the ouliers.”
On a district-level, Santa Fe public schools will be seeing security measures as well. A visitor identification system will be installed on to spot sex offendors and barricade devices will be put on all class room doors.
The district also plans to re-examine procedures for conducting lockdowns, shelter-in-place and fire drills.
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About the Author
Katie Malafronte, Web Editor
Katie Malafronte is Campus Safety's Web Editor. She graduated from the University of Rhode Island in 2017 with a Bachelor's Degree in Communication Studies and a minor in Writing & Rhetoric. Katie has been CS's Web Editor since 2018.
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until school leadership and parents come to the understanding that schools are no longer public spaces that anyone other than staff and students have access to during the school day we can not say that the the space where we educate our children is safe. The days that our public schools were open to Mom and Dad and past students are gone, or at least they should be. Too often we think about securing schools with technology and not policy first. Consider that the day after 9-11 the way we use to access airports as traveler or just as a visitor to the airport changed. It is true that more security technology was deployed, but what really happened overnight was that the access control policies changed, restricting how we accessed the airport and even when we could print out our boarding passes. Schools and Universities have to consider who really needs access to the space during the school day and become much more aware of student misbehavior. Until we get serious about access control policies our schools are not going to be secure.