Not just "where was the principal", but "where was the security guard"? I've heard reports he was "off site" driving "a vehicle" somewhere. Was he at lunch? Doing personal business? Wherever he was, he wasn't doing his job. He was the only hope. Unless the school admins could have locked down faster, but now it looks like the shooter entered the school very rapidly, within 1 to 2 minutes after he started shooting outside the school
I posted this somewhere around page 31: It is common for elementary schools to be served by the full-time middle and high school SROs (what you're calling a "security guard"), rather than having a full-time SRO for each building. In rural and suburban areas, it is
not common for elementary schools to have their own dedicated SROs. If there is an SRO at the elementary level only, that person would still likely be split between 2-8+ elementary buildings, depending on the district size.
In general: I’m baffled. A teacher (and possibly school administration?) appears to know there is an active shooter across the street and/or shooting at the school building….and that teacher goes outside to call 911, rather than alerting building administration and staff to a lockdown situation. To be clear, the moment an individual with a firearm was observed to be
in the vicinity of the school, the school should have been in strict lock-in/lockdown protocols. That should have happened
at least at the same time as when the district SRO received information about the threat. Lockdown/lock-in protocol means all exterior and interior doors are locked; all windows are covered; no one leaves their rooms; no one leaves the building; no one goes into rooms; no one enters the building. EVERYONE is
rooted in place. No one is going to a back door to call 911.
Since it appears that classroom doors were not locked before the shooter used the teacher's propped-open back door to gain entry, it appears appropriate lock-in/lockdown protocols were not put in place at the time the threat was perceived and before the shooter gained entry.
With the information known so far (recognizing it appears to be ever-changing in this matter), it appears as though there were significant procedural failures here. And it appears, from information known so far, that it was preventable with the policies and security procedures that had been practiced and drilled and that are practiced/drilled by every school in the country. (The same applies to the Michigan school shooter/Crumbley case. That school's administration did not appear to follow nationally known procedures/policies when the parents refused to take their high risk kid to a treatment center. I only say this, because the armchair quarterbacking on how to make schools 100% safe isn't any more helpful than debating gun control in this thread, IMO. Our hard-learned preventative policies and procedures work when they are followed, just as airplanes generally don't crash when pilots and ATCs follow their hard-learned policies and procedures.)
MOO. IMO.
