American schools need to be as safe as possible, but there is still resistance to putting a school safety plan that has never failed in place. If the only open door to a school has a police officer with a wand metal detector at it and all the other school doors are locked with alarms that go off if the lock is attacked, schools are very safe because the on site officer can respond immediately to any threat. There has never been an American school shooting in which the shooter has engaged a police officer at the school door in order to gain entrance to the school. School shooter lock down procedure drills are a good idea if there is a possibility that a shooter can enter a school, but they are not the best form of school safety. After hearing about the horrible shooting at the Oregon elementary school for a whole day a police officer at the door was finally mentioned by a school safety expert on a TV news show I was watching, but he immediately mentioned that the cost of that extreme safety measure is a negative. School children and the staff that serves them are priceless and they need to be protected by the best protection that is available. 

In another school shooting that occurred years ago I ran across a discussion of a police officer at a school’s door where the question of the officer needing to leave his post to go to the restroom came up. Having a construction site portable restroom next to the officer’s desk so he could lock the school door for a moment, but remain on duty was the solution for that problem. The negatives of having an officer at a school’s only open door during school hours are far outweighed by having school children feel safe when they are in a school. America’s schools should not be soft targets for crazy killers.