As reported on CBC News, amid reports indicating shootings are becoming more common at U.S. high schools, Bob Szymoniak says it’s time to start designing school infrastructure to maximize the safety of students and staff.

Szymoniak is a school superintendent in west Michigan, where a $48-million US construction project is underway at Fruitport High School. The building is specially designed to make it harder for a potential shooter to get at their targets — and it’s a type of school design that architects in other areas of the U.S. are starting to experiment with.

According to the Washington Post, more than 228,000 students have been exposed to gun violence since the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in 1999.

Classes will begin at Fruitport High School on Sept. 3, but the construction is not expected to be finished until 2021.

Szymoniak spoke with As It Happens guest host Helen Mann about the school’s new design. Here is part of their conversation.

Can you walk me through some of the security features that the new Fruitport High School will have? 

We curved the hallways, and the reason we did that was to reduce the sight lines if, God forbid, we had an active shooter in the hallway.

We also built “wall wings,” we’re calling them. These are cement block walls that are perpendicular to the hallway walls that jut out into the hallway about four feet to further reduce the sight lines of an active shooter. And they also provide refuge for students who would be in the hallway.

And these walls are built adjacent to the classroom doors. So if need be, a student behind the wall could get help immediately from within the classroom.

Once the students are in the classroom, there is what we call a “shadow zone” where we have built another wall wing into the classroom that cuts down dramatically the sight line into the classroom.

So if I’m an active shooter and I’m in the hallway, and the students are in that shadow zone and I look into the classroom, I can’t tell anybody’s there.

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