Ok, I’m going in.
I’m standing in front of the door: it is still locked. Should I knock?
I must be really dumb. you all sound so convinced. Yet I can’t figure out what you want me to do about the doors.
Note: This was covered earlier in the thread, maybe you could search and skim through the thread to find what has already been asked and answered very thoroughly. Then if you still have a question, ask it.
[ I apologize, I was ninjaed by your Mod suggestion above, and I am deleting my sarcastic response. ]
Modhat: Please watch it, that is a very borderline post.
Cool and understood.
Are we really at; locked doors are to the police as Kryptonite is to Superman?
And all windows are both opaque and bulletproof.
I’d like to refer you to my earlier post:
Reports are calling it a jack & jill bathroom, which to me means a unisex bathroom that can be accessed from both rooms. I assume the closets would be located in the same wall simply for design reasons.
For all you old duffers out there, it’s like the bathroom the Brady Bunch kids had. 
I mentioned that earlier, but I couldn’t find the cite.
Now I’ve found it. Link
But for 77 minutes, according to a new timeline provided by McCraw, the shooter traveled between two classrooms connected by a shared bathroom while students and teachers were calling 911 for help, including a girl who begged, “Please send police now.”
I wasn’t talking about exterior doors. I was talking about classroom doors. If the idea is that students are supposed to lockdown in a classroom, it doesn’t make sense to have the hinges on the outside of the classroom if they can be removed with a $20 tool.
It’s worth noting that the idea of putting a classroom into lockdown isn’t to create an impenetrable room that even a determined attacker could not breach absent special tools, but on the assumption that a mass murderer looking to kill as many people as fast as possible will not want to play around with a locked door, but will instead proceed along trying the next door, and the next door, and the next, and that hopefully all of them will be either locked or the rooms will be vacant, thus buying time for people to escape and for police to arrive. It’s one of those ounce of prevention kind of things.
So… I don’t really understand why we’re talking about what kind of hinges the doors had or where they were arranged. Even to the extent it might have made it harder for law enforcement to enter via the doors, I thought we had it well and truly established that there were way more options to enter the rooms than via just the doors.
It’s a red herring.
That varies as far as I know. I’ve seen interior doors swing in or out. I’m thinking these days it depends on what is considered the bigger concern: Fire or Shooter safety.
Not really, it’s becoming clear that we’re creating impenetrable rooms that a determined first responder can’t breach absent special tools . . . or the fucking key which should have been extremely, for them, easy to access.
(That first paragraph nails it! All security like this is just to, and only, buys you time. And sometimes that’s enough.)
Just as a wag I looked up school fire deaths in the US. US school fires, grades K-12, with 10 or more deaths. There are 8 entries on that list. The last one being from 1954.
And looking at List of school shootings in the United States by death toll there have been 10 shootings with more than 10 victims, including Uvalde last week.
I know where that basic information tells me to spend some effort.
We’ve all seen Aliens, right?
Good point. There were also the vents to consider, and as a last ditch effort the police always could have nuked the classrooms from orbit. Couldn’t have done that much more harm than waiting an hour for children to bleed to death with a mass murderer in the room.
If only the cops had micro cutting torches then they could have cut through the bars on the windows!
I feel like we’re forgetting something painfully obvious:
Always a big fan of the Bu-Tane clan.
I’ve started posting this a dozen times, but I’ve always gotten too distressed. My classroom was the first one inside the main entrance, so my students and I seemed more vulnerable. I mentally rehearsed the active shooter scenario weekly in the probably foolish hope that I might save a few kids. (I figured I’d be killed. The teacher usually is.) It hits close to home. I guess it does to most teachers, current or former. I once had a mentally ill kid bring a gun in his backpack. My classroom, like the one in Uvalde, was Rm.111. In the old “shelter in place” days, the police chief said the cops would have all they could do to keep armed and panicked parents out of the building, and it’d take four hours to get a SWAT team in. “You’ll be on your own,” he and the principal said. Those kids in Uvalde rooms 111 and 112 were on their own. Hence my distress.
I’m no “Blue Lives Matter” flag-waver. Don’t get me started on the massive reforms needed in law enforcement. But I’m pretty sick of this “The cops were all cowards!” and “The cops were too stupid to figure out they needed to go through the windows!” speculation. The fact is, we don’t KNOW why they didn’t enter, so, hating blanks in the narrative as we do and driven by the rage, grief, and frustration we’re all feeling, most of us are filling in those blanks with whatever fits our own narratives. I guess doing so feels a little like getting the answers that are so slow in coming.
To me it seems pretty clear that there were egregious f*ck-ups, terrible communication, and an unbelievable amount of confusion, mostly, it appears, at the top. But I suppose those are assumptions. I was not in that hallway. I was not outside those windows. I’m not going to assume all those cops were cowardly and/or dumb, not yet. We have too little to go on.
Two other things:
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It’s bullshit to suppose nobody but one custodian had a master key. In every school I’ve taught, every one I’ve visited, the principal and asst. principal have ALWAYS had master keys. Always. So do all the custodians, though most of them start work after school. And so did the school RO. Yes, early reports said LE had to wait for the custodian, but we’ve had a lot of false reports–another frustration.
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We don’t know what the classroom doors looked like, only that they had a window. My door did, too, a 4" wide, wired glass window positioned so you couldn’t reach through and turn the handle. (We did not have crash bars.) Let’s not assume that a broken door window gave access.
I’m not going to speculate as to why they didn’t breach the outside window because I don’t KNOW why they didn’t. I only know 19 kids and 2 teachers are dead. I know some of them probably wouldn’t be if help had arrived sooner. I know all of them would be alive if Salvador Ramos hadn’t walked into that building determined to get a high kill count of little kids.
And I know who’s really to blame for all these deaths: I am. We all are. Every one of us who argue after every damned school shooting and then wander away muttering without having pushed for a single change, everyone who pushed for change and then got distracted and quit. In four weeks, five weeks, how many of us will even be discussing Uvalde? Will I? Maybe I don’t want to know.