Lynn students find safety in numbers

LYNN – When students return to school next week, they will be safer than ever thanks to the efforts of the Lynn Police and a few classmates who started an engineering internship and ended up leaving their permanent mark on the city’s schools this summer.A partnership between the Lynn Police Department and the Lynn Public Schools has led to a comprehensive overhaul of school safety procedure and training over the last two years, as police officers, faculty and students are all learning how to handle a crisis situation and keep schools safe from dangerous intruders.Along with the installation of security doors and identification systems at each school, a major component to the new security effort is educating police on the layout of every school building in case of an incident.This is where the department turned to the students for help.Six English High School students taking part in a paid engineering internship were given the daunting task of updating blueprints for every school in the city last year. The blueprints will be part of the master safety plan that will be distributed to each school and used to train faculty and police officers.Once the blueprints were complete, the students began visiting the schools and spray-painting numbers on each exterior door, so that police will know exactly where they are going in case of an incident.The hope is that the blueprints will eventually be uploaded onto computers housed in police cruisers so if a call comes in from one of the city’s schools, officers can save time by locating exactly which part of the school they need to respond to.”Now instead of going to the main office when a call comes in, officers will look and see ?OK, the shooter is near door A-7′ and respond right there,” said School Safety and Security Officer Robert Ferrari, who is overseeing the entire security overhaul. “That 30-40 seconds to a minute is vital, that could be the difference between saving someone’s life. This is critical to our master plans for every school.”Updating the blueprints was no easy task for students, who in some cases had to physically enter school buildings and manually measure rooms.”Most schools already had a basic update, but some of the blueprints were so old they still had sewing rooms in some of the middle schools,” said Erina Keefe, who is one of four recent graduates of English finishing up the internship this summer.Of the six students, four have graduated this past spring and the remaining two are high school seniors.Eventually, the blueprints will not only end up in the police cruisers, but also into a master resource book that will feature everything there is to know about each school. The book will house floor plans, bird’s-eye shots of the schools and maps detailing the door markings made by the students.The students used the national standards for door marking, meaning that the door furthest to the left would be labeled door A-1 with letters continuing clockwise and numbers continuing counterclockwise.The students have completed 24 of the 26 school buildings in the city, with just Classical and the Ingalls Elementary School left to go. Those two schools should be completed before school starts.”This is an amazing group of kids,” said Ferrari. “They are really leaving their mark on the city.”The students understand the importance of the project as well, and hope that their efforts will help keep their classmates and future Lynn students safe in the event of a crisis.”It is important just for the police to get organized. If they know a shooter is in classroom 32, they now can pinpoint exactly where that is,” said recent graduate Hunter Richard.