This week’s tragedy in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., and other intruder incidents at schools are reviving conversations across Canada about school safety — including controlled access and entry procedures.
School officials and safety experts spoke to CBC News about entrance protocols, challenges to limiting entryways and why some opt to keep doors unlocked.
While the specific entry protocols in place at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School aren’t known, “in many communities, it’s a given that you can’t just open a school door,” said Alan Campbell, president of the Canadian School Boards Association.
That said, not every school defaults to locking its doors after classes start — and some simply don’t have entrance surveillance systems to monitor and control entry, said Campbell, who’s also a Manitoba school trustee.
“Whether you’re a rural or an urban community, the prospect of having the schools locked at all times and the need for anyone, parents included, to buzz in to get access to that school is received very differently … from one community to the next,” he said.
For about a decade in the rural community where Campbell lives, “every one of our public schools has been locked up, and you have to push a button to get buzzed in,” he said.
“That is not necessarily the norm in all schools in Manitoba and … not necessarily the norm across the country.”
In British Columbia schools, it’s expected “that most doors are locked, that people come through the front entrance only, that the front entrance also comes with a sign-in process so that we know and can identify visitors,” Trish Smillie, superintendent of School District 8 Kootenay Lake, a southeastern B.C. district that includes rural and remote regions, told CBC’s Daybreak South.
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Elementary schools, where everyone is generally on the same schedule, are more likely to lock their doors and have a buzzer for entry, but more high schools are switching to a similar model, said Jeff Maharaj, president of the Ontario Principals Council and a high school administrator in Durham District School Board for 25 years.
With a lot more movement in high school — due to staggered schedules, for instance, or students coming and going from portables, Maharaj said — limiting access can be trickier, especially when factoring in a school’s design, aging infrastructure, larger student population and staffing needed to monitor doors and hallways.
“An elementary school might have one obvious front door and a handful of secondary exits,” said Donna Gingera of Edmonton, who founded the emergency preparedness consultancy Hour-Zero School Safety Program in 1999.
“A high school might have 20-plus legitimate exterior doors serving different programs,” from athletics spaces to theatres to tech shops — some of which may also be open for community use, she said in an email. “From a facility standpoint, this creates access points that were never originally designed for tight perimeter control.”
With many schools built decades ago, retrofitting for controlled entry can be too costly for some schools, Gingera said, especially with boards also juggling other pressing infrastructure concerns that come with aging buildings, such as seismic upgrades in B.C. or HVAC modernization.
Smillie, the Kootenay Lake superintendent, said having schools locked up at all times can feel “quite foreign to us in Canada,” pointing to stricter measures during the COVID-19 pandemic as an example.
“What we want to have are schools as community resources and open and inclusive to community members, so we want that open-door policy,” she said from Nelson, B.C.
“We want to make sure that we have … safety in unexpected circumstances, but having open doors generally appears more inviting. Philosophically, I think it’s important that schools are part of the community and families feel like they’re part of the school and can come in when needed.”
Balan Moorthy, superintendent of B.C.’s Fraser-Cascade School District 78, said he foresees safety reviews and additional training in the coming days — similar to how a wave of new training procedures around threat assessments emerged after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, back when he was a vice-principal.
“This last incident [in Tumbler Ridge], which is closer to home, is going to do that again. It’s going to cause schools and our ministries to be even that much more vigilant around training, around violent threat assessments,” he said this week from Hope, B.C.
Ontario school principal Maharaj said he believes schools have indeed improved safety over time, noting that lockdown and hold-and-secure drills “didn’t exist 25 years ago” but have become common.
Along with adding entrance cameras and buzzer entries at schools without them, “we need to make sure our buildings are well maintained, because it’s great to have all the doors locked, but if a door doesn’t close properly behind a person that’s gone through, then we’ve compromised the building,” he said.
Maharaj said there’s always room for school staff, board officials, education ministries, police and communities to collaborate on additional ways to improve safety — even having teachers in hallways to greet students and steer unknown faces to the office.
“We’re not talking about putting bars on windows and having guards on doors. What we’re talking about is simple things that we can do to make sure that schools are safe.”
