School security a major challenge, but just one of several district faces

Last Monday, April 14, the New Prague School Board was formally briefed on enhancing building security at its three elementary schools and junior high school. The proposed cost? $5.1 million.
School security and building maintenance were discussed by a task force five times in February and March. There was no discussion of ongoing maintenance needs during Monday’s workshop.
Without publicizing the details of security plans – legally, the district doesn’t have to – proposed plans generally call for the entrances to the junior-senior high school, the Raven Stream, Eagle View and Falcon Ridge elementary schools to be restricted, requiring a visitor to enter the school through the main office where the person would be screened before being granted access to the portions of the school where innocent children learn.
The measures represent a huge investment in building security. At a time when the three buildings were planned and constructed, school shootings were not part of the nation’s lexicon. Today, they are all too common.
From 2000 through 2022, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), there were 328 casualties (131 killed and 197 wounded) nationally in active shooter incidents at elementary and secondary schools and 157 casualties (75 killed and 82 wounded) in active shooter incidents at postsecondary institutions. In 1966, there were nine recorded K-12 school shootings in the United States, according to David Riedman of the K-12 School Shooting Database. The number of shootings jumped from 60 to 119 between 2017 and 2018. There were 349 K-12 school shootings in 2023 and 332 shootings in 2024, according to the database.
Minnesota has had 41 mass shootings since 2020 and guns are the number three leading cause of death of children, according to the Sandy Hook Promise.
Think this is just fear-mongering? If a school shooting can happen in Cold Spring (2003, two children killed) and Red Lake Senior High School (2005, seven dead) in Minnesota, it can happen anywhere. Even New Prague. We pray to God it never does.
No doubt school administrators in Cold Spring, the Red Lake Indian Reservation or even Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, ever dreamed of the horror of a school shooter.
We know guns don’t kill children – people do. We also know there’s a link between mass shootings and mental health challenges though experts disagree on the strength of the link. “The reality is that people with mental illness account for a very small proportion of perpetrators of mass shootings in the U.S.,” says Ragy Girgis, MD , associate professor of clinical psychiatry in the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Fighting for gun control legislation is an uphill battle. Between 2016 and 2018, the National Rifle Association (NRA) spent about $54.4 million lobbying U.S. senators and representatives to oppose gun control laws, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. The NRA contributed $868,651 to candidates and spent $4.345 million in lobbying in 2023 and 2024, according to OpenSecrets.
Last year, a member of a local law enforcement SWAT team suggested the school board allow staff to carry weapons to protect themselves and students. During Monday’s workshop discussion, Director Carrie Cuff, asked about the potential of an armed guard in school buildings.
Sadly, a $5.1 million investment in building security will likely only buy time for law enforcement to respond.
And lest we forget, in New Prague, the proposed investment in school security is dwarfed by the amount of needed ongoing maintenance work. School districts are limited what they can levy for maintenance of facilities. New Prague receives about $1.5 million annually and uses about $500,000 to repay a facilities bond. The district has identified $65 million in facilities maintenance needs in the next decade.
Sooner or later, the delta between district’s facilities needs and available funding must be addressed along with building security.