CLEVELAND — The Nashville school shooting has parents across the country thinking about the safety of their own kids and the security of their schools. Over the last three years, Ohio has been quietly addressing safety upgrades in our schools through its K-12 School Safety Grant Program.
The state has awarded $173 million in school safety grants, coming to Lakewood in February to announce $1 million in funding for district-wide upgrades they had been trying to find the money for.
Superintendent Maggie Niedzwiecki told News 5 at the time they had identified several projects like treating the floor-to-ceiling windows in the high school with a ballistic film to better protect them against bullets or other objects. They wanted to also fix locks on classroom doors as well as buy a signal booster to eliminate spots in the school where resource officers had little or no reception on their radios. The problem? Trying to figure out in which budget year they could pay for them. So in the end they've been put off.
"Nobody ever wants to do that if those are things that have been identified and we want to ensure that our defense to any shooter that could happen or any event that could happen at our schools we want to do it immediately," she said.
So far, $22.3 million has been awarded to 100 public and private schools and school districts in Cuyahoga County alone.
CLICK HERE to see how much funding each district in the state is receiving.
And odds are your child's school is listed among the nearly 2,400 getting money so far and if not, with more than $40 million still to be awarded any day now, DeWine said last month they likely soon will.
"This means that every qualifying school that applied for funding but did not get it will now receive a grant for the upgrades needed to make their schools safer," said DeWine.
Money for safety equipment is nice, but school security experts warn "it's a balance between hardware and heartware." Training of school staff is key to the equation, said Kenneth Trump who has consulted on Sandy Hook, Parkland, and other school shootings.
"The human piece, the training, has to go a long side by side with the technology; it's just not an issue of throw up the shiny objects, put in the hardware and say we're done and tell parents that we have that in place because you can create a false sense of security," Trump said.
He said we saw that balance in Nashville through the quick action of the first responders, in the police, but the true first responders were the staff.
"What saved lives in Nashville was the fact that you had school staff who moved quickly enough to lock down students, reduce visible targets in the hallways and get kids in a safe place as law enforcement was responding," he said.
"As we invest more and more in target hardening, security, equipment, products and hardware, schools are investing less and less in time for training their school staff and we know that when security fails, it's due to failed human factors, people, policies, training, communications. It's not due to failed security hardware products and equipment."
Another pitfall of the one-time money is that it's exactly that and districts need to factor that into future plans.
"State grants provide one-time shots in the arm," said Trump. "That may be nice, but will you be able to pay for the repair of those cameras that you got funded through a grant two years from now? How will you staff that school resource officer position once the well runs dry with the state grants?"
