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On the morning of April 20, 1999, two students walked into Columbine High School in Colorado with a semiautomatic handgun, a rifle, and two sawed-off shotguns. They killed 12 students and a teacher, wounded 21 others, and then killed themselves.
A few weeks later, Ann Neeriemer graduated from North Buncombe High School in western North Carolina. Like the rest of America, she was shocked by the Columbine shooting, and its impact on her continues.
“I have never not thought about it,” said Neeriemer, a Raleigh architect who designs school buildings. “It’s always been present.”
In the 25 years since Columbine, the list of places remembered for such tragedies has grown: Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde. And in North Carolina, like elsewhere, architects and school administrators have pondered how to build K-12 buildings that offer protection against armed assailants.
The Center for Homeland Defense and Security tracks gun violence in K-12 schools across the country. From 1995 to 2010, there were an average of 32 gun incidents a year, according to the center’s data. Since then, the average has increased to 118 a year.
School shootings most frequently occur in a parking lot (23 percent) or inside a classroom (10 percent), according to an analysis of the data by Campus Safety magazine, an authoritative source.
Strategic design offers a line of defense to slow or stop intruders. For architecture firms, the challenge lies in finding a balance between openness and security. They want students to feel unafraid, comfortable, and eager to learn—rather than threatened or imprisoned for 25 hours a week.
“Hardened, fortress-like school buildings often reinforce the stressors or trigger previous trauma,” said a 2020 report on best practices co-written by Neeriemer, “exactly the opposite of what we would want for our children.”
“I have never not thought about it. It’s always been present.”
Ann Neeriemer, a Raleigh architect who designs schools
Neeriemer is a mother, as are the leaders of three other leading K-12 design shops that operate in North Carolina. They are driven by the desire to understand how children learn and to improve school environments—though design is not the sole solution to school shootings.
Barbara Crum is Perkins&Will’s southeast K-12 practice leader, based in Atlanta. Crum, who has two daughters, leads a team of 20 architects devoted to school design. “I just felt if you really want to make a difference in this world, it’s in affecting our children,” she said.
Her team has designed two middle schools in Wake County and is working now with Durham’s O’Brien Atkins Associates on a new building for the Durham School of the Arts. It’s to be built on 54 acres of the original Duke homestead, which Durham Public Schools bought in 2010 from Duke University.
As her practice plans for the new building to open in 2026, safety for its students in grades 6-12 is its mantra. “All the time,” she said, “we’re thinking about security issues.”
Controlling Access
The architects think about security in unconventional ways. In some places, they want to create visibility; in other places, they want barriers.
“The principal wants to see it all when she walks down the corridor,” Crum said. “There are areas of refuge in the classrooms with solid walls, but basically the principal wants to see everything going on in her school.”
That means hallways lined with glass, for eye-level viewing inside and out of every classroom. But metal lockers cover the bottom three feet above the floor.
“Kids can hide inside behind that area,” she said. “If a shooter is coming down the hall, the shooter can’t see them.”
Perkins&Will uses glass generously elsewhere in its school designs. The firm wants activity in all instructional spaces—including media centers and cafeterias—to be visible. Glazing is used in gyms for natural light, with bands of windows high above walls to control the angle of daylight.
School entry points also are more transparent—and there are fewer of them. Schools built in the 1960s and ’70s often were designed with multiple buildings connected by open external walkways. But in the complete redesign of an older Triangle-area school, the architecture firm Clark Nexsen reduced entry points from 56 to three.
It’s no longer necessary for students in the new school to go outside to get from one class to another. There’s a separate entrance for athletics and for the performing arts, both of which are controlled during the day.
“Security’s increased by eliminating the need to go outside for your next class,” said Donna Francis, the K-12 leader in Clark Nexsen’s Raleigh office.
Francis grew up in Orange County, and earned her master’s degree from North Carolina State University’s College of Design. When she had children, her personal and professional lives aligned.
She believes that the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012 influenced the public ethos even more than Columbine, which occurred before social media’s advent. A gunman killed 26 people at the Connecticut elementary school with an AR-15-style rifle and two semiautomatic handguns. Twenty were between the ages of 6 and 7.
“It was the horror of seeing first graders or kindergartners shot down,” she said.
Her firm has designed more than 40 schools since the early 1990s, many of them for the Wake County Public School System. They designed its prototype elementary school and have reconfigured it over 15 times.
“It has been modified to meet the changing needs of the school system, but it’s the same basic footprint,” she said.
Three Layers of Doors
The main entrance to any school is a focal point for security, transparency, and surveillance. It offers wide-ranging vantage points to the outside—and to security inside. “The school administrator or staff can see out and judge behaviors,” said Neeriemer, an architect at Perkins Eastman. “We want that control, to minimize access.”
After every student has entered the building in the morning, administrators can control who has access to the interior and who doesn’t.
At the main entry, architectural best practices recommend three layers of doors and a lockable vestibule that leads to a reception area. An individual deemed reliable can be admitted and badged.
“Hardened, fortress-like school buildings often reinforce the stressors or trigger previous trauma.”
a 2020 report on best practices
The front door may be unlocked, but once someone is admitted inside that vestibule, it’s usually controlled by electronic locks for deterrence. “You can see who it is, how they’re behaving, and ask, ‘Do they belong?’” Neeriemer said.
The architects call for special glass to be installed in both vestibule doors—at the entry and to the reception area. “It’s shatter-proof, not bullet-proof, and designed to slow them down,” said Perkins&Will’s Crum.
For windows at ground level, micro-layered, tear-resistant security film can be applied over existing glass panes, making them difficult to break. It’s an optional added layer of building perimeter security, but it can add significant costs.
“Because it’s a transparent, virtually invisible product, architecturally we don’t have reservations about using it if the client chooses to invest in this strategy,” Neeriemer said.
She opened Perkins Eastman’s Raleigh office in 2021 and runs its K-12 practice. The studio has 14 architects who’ve designed four schools in North Carolina, as well as others in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and abroad.
Clear Sightlines
Outside, landscape architects open up views for administrators and seek to slow down potential intruders with a variety of strategies, including what kind of trees and shrubs are planted.
“All security risks cannot be eliminated, but we can do thoughtful planning and design to mitigate unwanted guests and make it more challenging for an intruder,” said landscape architect Renee Pfeifer of Cary-based CLH Design.
She has developed site designs for schools across North Carolina since she joined the firm in 2002. She’s a mother of three who’s worked her way up to president of the 30-year-old, 24-person firm.
CLH also designs projects for universities and community colleges, but the firm’s emphasis is on site design for K-12 schools. “Design can encourage or discourage intrusion,” she said.
Designing school sites requires thoughtful sequencing for car drop-off and pickup, with circuitous, lengthy driveways rather than a direct route to the front door of the facility. That reduces the risk of a planned attack and helps prevent abductions and students getting hit by vehicles.
The driveways slow down the pace of arrival and allow administrators to see who’s coming on-site. There’s a clear separation of uses—for student drop-off, bus drop-off, and staff and visitor parking—as well as student parking for the high schools.
Clear sightlines are important. Because not every site is flat, that design is always specific to the school. Landscape architects design exterior areas with plantings that don’t create hiding places. Trees are trimmed six to eight feet above the ground for visibility.
Planting low-level shrubs near a building discourages people from getting close to it. “We think it through to reduce the amount of hiding spots where an intruder can hide behind the plantings,” Pfeifer said.
Designers avoid creating blind spots or obstacles at exit and entry points to the building. Some schools use security cameras on playgrounds and athletic fields. “We don’t obstruct views from the cameras,” she said.
These are all good examples of what’s called “crime prevention through environmental design,” which is admissible in court in case of litigation, said Michael Dorn of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit campus safety organization.
Seeking a Balance
Ultimately, schools are meant to be places where students can focus on their studies while finding friends and mentors.
“I’m interested in how a physical building influences learning,” Neeriemer said. “I want architecture to be a scaffold for students to be the best they can be.”
The bottom line for students when it comes to a school’s design is that they feel safe to learn inside its walls—with no concerns about what’s happening outside. “They can’t learn if they’re afraid someone is going to come in and shoot them,” Clark Nexsen’s Francis said.
Neeriemer noted in the paper she co-wrote that architecture can play an important role in school security, but the physical environment alone is not a solution.
Safety is intertwined with other aspects of life and learning. It can’t be achieved simply through physical means, layers of technology, and security systems or solely through passive design strategies, policies, and cultivation of a healthy culture. “Truly safe schools require a balance among all of these,” she said.
At a time when many people feel like schools nationwide are under siege, North Carolina hasn’t experienced a tragedy on the scale of Columbine or Sandy Hook.
Part of that’s good fortune. Part of it’s because of a heads-up attitude from administrators, teachers, and security staff. And part of it’s because good design can be effective in mitigating school threats, inside and out.
J. Michael Welton is the author of Drawing from Practice: Architects and the Meaning of Freehand (Routledge, 2015). His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Metropolis, Dwell, and The News & Observer in Raleigh. He is editor and publisher of the digital design magazine www.architectsandartisans.com.