High School Adds New Layer of Security

ballistic protection

Ohio’s Canfield High School improves school safety with frontline ballistic protection

The need for innovative solutions to counter the U.S. school shooting epidemic becomes more urgent each day, as our country now experiences an incident almost every week, according to public service website EveryTown for Gun Safety. It’s an eyeopening statistic for school administrators and parents who prefer to believe those situations can’t occur under their watch.

Canfield High School, named as one of Newsweek’s Top Public High Schools in 2016, responded to that statistic. The Ohio school wanted to provide a high level of security while maintaining an open and inviting learning environment. The school also needed a solution that would work with its existing Emergency Action Plan and response protocol training, the ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) methodology. The school selected and installed WonderTiles from Safe Place Solutions to meet those needs.

The customized ballistic surface tiles were installed to harden public and communal areas of the school. Built to withstand up to NIJ Level III attacks, WonderTiles offer the highest level of ballistic personal protection currently available. Should the school ever need to employ Lockdown mode as part of the ALICE protocol, the tiles will be in place to protect the school and occupants.

“Safe Place Solutions has effectively covered our students and faculty against the threat of an active shooter attack,” says Canfield schools Superintendent Alex Geordan. “Our ALICE protocol combined with the WonderTiles protection will buy time until help arrives.”

Safe Place Solutions is a subsidiary of Clifton Steel, a pioneer in the design and manufacturing of ballistic armor for the U.S. military for more than two decades. Safe Place Solutions creates a range of ballistic products that help provide additional layers of protection, empowering administrators to implement the most comprehensive protection plans available. For more information, visit blockbullets.com.

www.blockbullets.com

This article originally appeared in the issue of .

Featured

  • University of Kansas Breaks Ground on Entrepreneurship Hub

    The University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan., recently held a groundbreaking ceremony for the new KU Entrepreneurship Hub, according to university news. The Hub is part of the university’s School of Business and will include spaces for experiential learning and programming.

  • Designing for Every Mind

    Learning environments have the power to shape not just what students know, but who they become. When a school is designed with genuine empathy—for the full range of ways students think, sense, and engage with the world—it becomes more than a building. It becomes a catalyst for growth, confidence, and belonging. That is the animating idea behind neurodiverse design, and it is one that is transforming how more architects and designers are thinking about school design.

  • Surging Demand for Student Housing Fuels Major Campus Investment Opportunities

    University leaders throughout the U.S. are accelerating plans to modernize and expand student housing as enrollment stabilizes and demand for on-campus living rebounds. Recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicates that total postsecondary enrollment is projected to grow through the end of the decade, with undergraduate enrollment alone expected to increase by more than 8 percent by 2030.

  • abstract illustration of school gym

    How the Gymnasium Can Serve as a Model for Learning Space Design

    Multipurpose gyms work because flexibility was built into the brief from the start, not retrofitted later. The same logic applies to academic spaces.