If you’re an Eagan student, odds are you’ve been in a classroom without either a fourth wall or a door. The walk out two weeks ago showed that students are worried about gun violence near their learning spaces. So that begs the question: does EHS need more doors for classrooms?
“Without doors I feel like anything can happen at any time and there’s nothing to protect us, ” stated sophomore Adviti Gupta. Open classrooms leave students more exposed in the event of an emergency, including fire and tornado. Around a third of classrooms in EHS don’t have doors according to Principal Dr. Polly Reikowski.
“Well, I wasn’t part of the designing of this building, so I didn’t have an opinion,” said Reikowski, “But I can tell you this: in all the years I was a teacher and then a principal, I’ve never been in a building where all the rooms had doors.”
The lack of doors in schools has been an issue since the 1970s when the open floor plan was introduced. The idea was to create a community of learners through shared spaces. Schools built between the 1970s and 2000s including EHS tended towards classes that have three walls instead of four and no door on top of that. Many elementary schools like Pinewood, Deerwood, and Woodland and middle schools like Black Hawk and Dakota Hills in the district have this concept.
By the 1990’s most new schools, including most of the current High Schools in District 196 phased this out or added doors, including Eastview HS, Apple Valley HS, and Rosemount HS. Eagan has not.
“We’ve had to work around the whole idea that if you have to get out of sight and behind a door, you need to move,” stated Reikowski. “We’ve worked out with teachers. You come to my room; I won’t lock my door till your kids are here. We’ve tried to work it out so that you’d find a room with a door.”
But taking the time to find a room with a door leaves less time to hide, more planning needed by school security and administration on which class goes where, and how much space classrooms with doors have.
So if adding more doors would be more straightforward then complex plans and drills, why hasn’t Eagan just done it?
“Well, it’s a lot of money,” said Reikowski, “So they [District 196] would have to pass a bond issue to cover it, and in the latest bond issue, that wasn’t included.”
“Plus the whole heating cooling system,” she continued, “is built to draw from the library, up into the rooms, back into the library etc. So if you shut up all those rooms, we’d have to redo the heating cooling system where your rooms would either be too hot or too cold. So it’s a bigger thing than just, ‘Here’s a wall, here’s the door.’”
However, even with the concerns, EHS also has measures in place to prevent a dangerous scenario from happening in the first place.
“In the case of something happening in the building where we locked down, all the doors at the entries of the wings slam shut and are locked.” Reikowski explained, “So if there’s somebody running around here in the main hallway and we lock down they’re not getting in that way at all. On either level. The outside doors are locked when school starts. So the only way someone gets in is if somebody like me or you opens the door and lets them in.”
Security to get into the building is also closely monitored. Students coming late typically have to prove they are a student to gain entry, and all doors, except the main one by the office, require a badge to open.
District 196 itself is also responsible for a lot of policies surrounding safety, including drills. According to Dr. Reikowski, a foundation called I Love You Guys set up a chart of instructions for teachers, faculty, and staff on what to do in an emergency. Their chart has the guidelines for most of the drills that are practiced throughout the year. The chart is prominently displayed in all rooms, and on all teachers, and the drills help make the scenarios less unfamiliar.
One thing is clear: students, teachers, and faculty should be able to feel secure in emergencies, whether that means continuously improving safety features or adding doors to classrooms.