Today, the Los Angeles Unified School District has a goal of converting at least 30 percent of every schoolyard to green space, a years-long project that it expects to cost $3 billion. By its own estimate, about 475 schools do not meet that standard and, of them, more than 200 elementary schools have less than 10 percent green space. This analysis does not include school parking lots or truck delivery areas — paved surfaces that are likely to remain that way and raise the temperature around schools.
Webster, after years of waiting, is now on the list of schools to be renovated by the Trust for Public Land. The nonprofit will work with a class of third-graders and landscape architects for the next year to design a new schoolyard. Projects like this can take two to three years to complete, at a cost ranging from $400,000 to as much as $2.5 million, said Danielle Denk, who directs the organization’s schoolyard transformation work. In Philadelphia, most of the money for these projects comes from the water department, which is trying to make the city more capable of absorbing storm runoff.
I suppose it’s a bit of a unique case; my high school’s classrooms did not have doors, and we were located pretty close to wooded areas. Assuming there is an active shooter inside the building, running was deemed to be the safest choice if available.
I sometimes forget our architecture was a little nonstandard.
Shooters keep shooting for as long as they want unless they are forcibly stopped. Number of deaths are directly correlated with the duration of their attack. The sooner the attack is stopped, the fewer total deaths and injuries.
“Run, Hide, Fight” increases any individual’s own survival rate, but paradoxically, “Fight, Hide, Run” increases the survival rate of the entire group, even though it greatly increases risks to the “fighters”.
Try it with a paintball, airsoft, or squirt-gun wielding attacker and unarmed defenders. Tell the group that as soon as they know where the attacker is, charge him. If you don’t know where he is, hide until you figure it out. If there is no place to hide, run away. Count up the “dead”, and it will almost always be substantially lower when the group blitzes the attacker vs. when they try to avoid being killed by the attacker.