Word: permian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What had happened was that Permian, like thousands of other schools alarmed by recent campus shootings, had responded by clamping down on all sorts of security problems, from fights to theft, vandalism, graffiti and intruders. In an approach not unlike urban police clampdowns of recent years, schools have tried to create a new environment of conspicuous order and security. What school administrators, parents and students worry about most are potential copycat gun crimes, especially after it was revealed last week that T.J. Solomon, 15, accused of shooting six classmates last May in Conyers, Ga., had referred to the Littleton, Colo...
...schools, though, have tightened their security as thoroughly as Permian High. It has formed an alliance with Sandia Labs, based in Albuquerque, N.M., which has three decades of experience in locking down top-secret facilities that manufacture, transport and store nuclear weapons. Sandia started advising schools on security in 1991 after Congress ordered the labs to share the wealth of its technologies. Yet protecting a nuclear facility, says Sandia analyst Mary Green, is in some ways easier than securing a school. "Nuclear weapons usually stay where you put them," she says. "They don't have a lot of civil rights...
...Permian would like to see similar results on its 2,200-student campus. Like Belen High, it's a relatively safe school. But its administrators know that their counterparts in Littleton and Conyers thought the same of their schools. At Permian, Sandia is using both low tech and high tech. Student identification badges will not only immediately show who belongs and who doesn't but also contain bar codes school administrators can instantly scan to show everything from previous tardiness and truancies to medical records. (The badges can be used to buy lunches and check out library books too.) Visitors...
...black boxes will monitor classrooms. To safeguard such valuable school property as TVs and VCRs, Sandia has implanted each appliance with coded microdots that contain the name of the school and a serial number, which makes equipment easier to identify and recover. For the first time this fall, Permian will deploy drug and alcohol test kits, drug- and explosives-sniffing dogs and portable metal detectors for random searches...
...which guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches." Before police can legally search someone, they generally must have "probable cause" to believe the person has committed a crime. But courts have recently given schools wide leeway in searching lockers, cars and backpacks and administering drug tests even on a random basis. Permian High administrators, for example, periodically seal off hallways, order students to drop what they are carrying, then run the purses and backpacks through metal detectors...