School Safety That Works, Lessons From the Parkland and Uvalde Reviews

Every district has a school safety plan, and most of them live in a binder. A binder has never stopped anyone. A locked door has, and so has a radio that works, and so has an adult who knows in advance who is in charge.

That is the plain finding of the two most detailed official reviews of American school shootings. After the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 and the attack at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, investigators went through the buildings, the radio logs and the policies line by line. They did not mainly find a shortage of slogans. They found doors, communication and command.

This post is about those findings and what they mean for a parent. It is not about what any shooter believed, and it is not a debate about the larger political fights that follow every tragedy. It is a practical piece about the things a school can control. I will treat the victims with the respect they deserve, and I will not try to score points off them.

What happened, briefly

On February 14, 2018, a gunman killed seventeen people, fourteen students and three staff members, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. On May 24, 2022, a gunman killed nineteen children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Both events were investigated at length. Two documents matter most for this post: the report of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, which Florida created by statute and which issued its report in January 2019, and the Justice Department's Critical Incident Review of the response in Uvalde, released in January 2024. A Texas House committee also issued a report in 2022. All three are public, and a parent can read them.

What the Parkland commission found

The Florida commission was chaired by Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri and included law enforcement leaders, school officials and the parents of victims. Its report is long, and the details are painful. The findings that matter for the rest of us fall into a few groups.

1. Doors and locks. The commission found that lockdown procedures were unclear and that classrooms were slow to lock down, and it recommended classroom doors that lock from the inside and shades or coverings for door windows.
2. Entry and perimeter. The commission urged schools to keep gates and doors locked when not in use, to have staff present when they are used, and to staff and lock a single entrance.
3. Communication. The commission criticised the school's and the responding agencies' communication during the attack.
4. Command. The commission criticised the law enforcement response, including a Broward Sheriff's policy that said deputies "may" confront a shooter rather than "shall."
5. Entry by responders. The commission found that the armed deputy assigned to the school, Scot Peterson, did not go into the building to confront the attacker, and it called him derelict in his duty. The standard, as modern police training has taught since the Columbine attack of 1999, is rapid entry: the first officers on scene go toward the shooter rather than set up a perimeter and wait.
6. Warning signs. The commission urged earlier identification of dangerous students and better information-sharing among agencies, which is the work of a threat assessment team.

Notice what is missing from that list. There is no finding that a better slogan would have saved lives. The findings are about hardware, procedures, training, and the unglamorous work of coordination.

What the Uvalde review found

The Justice Department review, issued in January 2024, ran to hundreds of pages and covered the law enforcement response. Its headline number is one that every parent in America should remember: about 77 minutes passed before officers ended the threat. The review described "cascading failures." In summary, it found:

1. No one took command. The review cited confusion, miscommunication, lack of urgency and a lack of incident command.
2. Wrong training and wrong assumptions. The responders treated the situation as a barricaded subject rather than an active attacker, even though children were still being shot at as the review said an active attacker with access to victims should never be handled that way.
3. Communication failures. Officers lacked accurate updates and direction, and families later received incorrect or delayed information.
4. A failure of the standard. Attorney General Garland called the response a failure that should not have happened.
5. Door problems. The Texas House committee found that no one had locked the three exterior doors of the west building, in violation of school policy. A building safety plan that depends on a door nobody locks is a plan on paper.

Those findings echo Parkland's remarkably. A school can have fine-sounding policies and still fail because the doors, the radios and the command structure were not what the binder said they were.

What the reviews recommend, in plain terms

Putting the two together, the practical lessons are these. They are things that a parent, a board member or a principal can ask about.

Physical security

• A single, controlled point of entry during the school day, with other exterior doors locked and monitored.
• Classroom doors that lock from the inside, quickly, without a key and without stepping into the hall.
• Doors that actually latch. Do not trust a door because it has a lock. Test it. Several of the failures were doors that looked secure and were not.
• Fences, gates and visitor management that are used and not just installed.
• Windows and door glass that do not let an attacker open a door from outside by reaching in, and window coverings or placement that let a teacher keep the room out of sight.

Communication

• Radios that work inside the whole building, tested, with dead zones mapped and fixed.
• A way to alert the building that cannot be confused with a drill, and a way for a teacher to call for help without leaving the room.
• A joint communication plan with the sheriff and police, so that dispatchers and school staff talk to each other.
• Plain language, not codes, since codes confuse the people who need to react fastest.

Command and response

• A pre-agreed incident command among police, fire, EMS and the school, practiced together, so that nobody has to ask at the door who is in charge.
• Rapid entry doctrine, in writing, which means officers go toward the threat. If a district's police partners do not train on it, ask why.
• Drills that are realistic, including with the responding agencies, not just children in hallways.
• Reunification plans for families, tested ahead of time.

People and prevention

• Threat assessment teams that include a school administrator, a counsellor and a law enforcement representative, trained to evaluate concerning behaviour and to connect the dots across agencies. Florida requires a threat assessment team at each school under section 1006.07 of its statutes.
• A clear way to report a concerning statement or behaviour, and a clear record of what was done about it.
• Mental-health connections that do not just refer a student and forget him.

The Guardian question

Florida's response to Parkland included a program for armed school personnel. The 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act created the Guardian program. Under it, a sheriff may train and deputise willing school staff, excluding classroom teachers in the original version, to carry firearms on campus. The commission supported the program and recommended allowing teachers who volunteered to take part too, which the legislature later did.

Reasonable people disagree about this, and a fair account states both sides. Supporters argue that an armed adult already in the building can end an attack in seconds, while police may need minutes, and that the Uvalde response proves minutes are an eternity. Opponents argue that a carrying teacher adds risks of accidents and misidentification, that training must be real and ongoing, and that the cost of safe storage and liability is not trivial. I would add one observation to both: the Guardian option does not replace the other items on the list. A guardian behind a door that will not latch is still behind a door that will not latch. Whatever view a community takes, it should take it with the full facts and with the opinions of the parents who live there.

Why this is a conservative topic

Order is the first duty of government. The Preamble to the Constitution lists "insure domestic Tranquility" among its purposes, and the Declaration says that governments are instituted to secure the rights of life and liberty. A school is the one place where the state compels children to be present, which means the state owes them a safe building. That is not a controversial claim, and it is the strongest argument for treating safety as a core function rather than an extra.

It is also a place where conservative instincts for competence help. The right approach is not to pass a bill and congratulate ourselves. It is to inspect, test, drill and verify, the same habits one would apply to any important public work. A government that cannot keep a door locked has no business promising anything larger. And there is a quiet connection to an issue I have written about elsewhere: the discipline of order in the classroom, discussed in The 2014 School Discipline Guidance and the Commission That Withdrew It, is the same instinct as the locked door. Students learn when they feel safe, and they feel safe when adults mean what they say.

The coverage deserves a gentle word too. After each tragedy, the national conversation tends to leap to the most polarising debate available. The commission and Justice Department reports are less exciting and more useful. They ask who held the radio, who had the key and who made the call. Those are the questions that change what happens next time, and they have the advantage of being answerable.

What a parent can ask a district to show

You do not need to be an engineer to ask good questions. Here is a list, and a district that cannot answer most of it has told you something.

1. May I see the district's written emergency operations plan, or a summary of it? (Some details are properly withheld for security, but a summary can be shared.)
2. When was the last audit of door locks, and what did it find? Were classroom doors tested to see that they latch?
3. Does every classroom door lock from the inside without a key?
4. How many entrances are open during the school day, and how are visitors screened?
5. Do the radios work in every part of every building? When were they tested?
6. Who is the incident commander for each agency, and have they trained together?
7. What does the district's policy say about officers entering the building during an active attack?
8. Does the school have a threat assessment team, who is on it, and how often does it meet?
9. How are concerns reported, and what happens to a report?
10. When was the last drill that included police and fire, and what was learned?

Ask politely, in writing, and share the answers with other parents. Most school staff want the same thing you do. If the district stalls, see How to Request Records From Your School District and Actually Get Them for how to ask formally. For who decides what, see Who Actually Runs Your School District, Board, Superintendent or State. And for the larger question of keeping order, see Bell to Bell Phone Bans Are the Easiest School Reform in America, another case where the practical fix beats the slogan.

The strongest objection

One objection deserves a direct answer. It says that focusing on doors and drills "normalises" the threat, frightens children, and treats schools like fortresses, when the real cure is addressing the causes of violence.

I agree that causes matter, and a threat assessment team is a cause-oriented tool. But the objection sets up a false choice. A parent does not decline a smoke detector because it is a bleak reminder of fire. A locked door, a working radio and a trained responder do not make children afraid; the evidence of the two reviews is that their absence costs lives. Children are not hurt by a reasonable lock. They are hurt when the lock was never installed.

The case in brief

1. The Parkland commission (2019) and the Justice Department's Uvalde review (2024) found that the decisive failures were doors, communication and command, not shortages of policy slogans.
2. Parkland's findings included locks that worked only from outside, uncontrolled entry points, broken communication, no clear incident command, delayed entry by responders, and missed warning signs.
3. Uvalde's review found about 77 minutes before officers ended the threat, with no clear command, wrong assumptions and communication failures.
4. The practical lessons are single points of entry, classroom doors that lock from inside and latch, radios that work, joint command, rapid entry doctrine, realistic drills and threat assessment teams, with the Guardian option debated honestly on top.
5. Safety is a core duty of a government that compels children to attend, and parents can make it real by asking a district to show its audits, drills and plans.

What you can do: send your district the ten questions above in writing, and bring the answers to the next board meeting.