The New Sandy Hook Elementary School Is All About Invisible Security

“It’s not a barbed wire fence, it’s a combination of natural elements,” says the designer.

When the 2016 school year starts, students and faculty will return to Sandy Hook Elementary School for the first time since a gunman killed 20 students and six adults. They will return to a new building and landscape thoughtfully, but subtly, outfitted with security measures designed by local architecture firm Svigals + Partners.

The town of Newtown, Connecticut demolished the former building last fall, nearly a year after the shooting. It’s hard to imagine teachers, students, or parents would have wanted to return to a place filled with horrifying memories, like the parking lot where police gathered terrified children and faculty after evacuating them from the school on the morning of December 14, 2012. Yet the school had some features the Sandy Hook community loved, and has missed since the school closed.

“They really loved their courtyard,” says Jay Brotman, principal at Svigals + Partners and lead architect on the $50 million redesign. It’s become his job to know what the community misses, and what it can’t bear to see again, as Svigals designed the new campus. To do that, he and his team immersed themselves in the community, perhaps more so than architects typically would, and held six workshops with 50 parents, neighbors, teachers and other school officials over the course of a few months before breaking ground in October. "I’ve been a superintendent for 15 years and an administrator for 25 years, been involved in numerous building projects, and I’ve never been more impressed with anyone than Svigals and their approach and their willingness to make adjustments from community stakeholders," says Dr. Joseph Erardi, superintendent of the Newtown Public School District. The firm's ability to consider the thoughts and needs of everyone in the community---notably, the parents who lost children in the shooting---has been paramount to the redesign, Eradi said.

The new school will have three courtyards, thanks to a new floor plan. The old school was laid out in a looped square, so classrooms wrapped around one inner courtyard. The new building is shaped like an 'E' with four limbs: There's one central, slightly curved structure with four hallways that branch off of it. Green courtyards and small auditoriums will occupy the gaps between each of those. This gives the school more outdoor space, but it also would seem to provide more evacuation routes in an emergency. On the opposite side of the building, now “there’s a ‘there’ there,” Brotman says. “The front of the school is like an embrace. Now the building has this main street which is a collecting point for bake sales, book sales, where the community and the schools meet.”

The new entrance includes several invisible security checkpoints, like a special parking lot for visitors, and now serves as a gathering place for the school community.

Svigals + Partners
As Different As Possible, While Feeling Safer

Many of Svigals’s subtler security details have to do with that entrance. Buses can pull up in that curved driveway, but staff will park in one lot and visitors in another, helping school officials keep track of who’s coming and going. By re-landscaping the entrance, the architects honored the community’s wish to not revisit the original parking lot, where students and families were held as police arrived. The architects couldn’t negotiate the location of the street entrance, “so from there we figured out how to create a different pathway into the school so that it really feels and looks different than what it was before,” Brotman says.

The new entrance is crucial, because it promotes a feeling of comfort. Once visitors reach the school grounds, they pass through still more strategic, yet invisible, security measures. After Sandy Hook, school districts around the country began focusing intently on security systems like fences, guards, and shatterproof glass at entries. The new Sandy Hook will have impact-resistant windows and an intercom screening systems for visitors, but Brotman and the architects also found ways to make nature and landscaping work in their favor. For instance, to reach the entrance, visitors must cross one of three bridges that connect the front doors to the parking lots. To avoid the feeling of a fortress protected by a moat, the architects are turning those bridges into rain gardens that collect and filter runoff rainwater. They'll be an educational tool, rather than just a security checkpoint.

That also involved pushing the school back away from the road and closer to nearby wetlands. This affords a more expansive view of the entrance from the building, which makes it easier to spot people approaching, but also puts the building closer to a natural environment. "Just being exposed to nature increases one’s well being, and having children exposed to nature on a daily basis increases learning capacity,” Brotman says. Little details, like a few treehouse-style elevated classrooms, help enhance that feeling of being safely tucked away in the woods.

It's an unpleasant truth that schools today need to factor in more security measures than ever. Svigals is in an interesting position with Sandy Hook, because Columbine High School and buildings at Virginia Tech University were renovated, not replaced after the mass shootings on those campuses. For that reason, the Svigals team could look only to the patterns of assailants and the incidents that took place---rather than the buildings---for insight into what might work best at the new Sandy Hook. It took the Newtown shooting to reignite attention to school security systems. (After Sandy Hook, one-third of the country's schools reported outdated security systems to the Department of Education.) When the school opens, it seems that all eyes will be on it. "The school will probably have more scrutiny from the state, or region from the country, than any school to date," Erardi says.

That's because, beyond the school's reopening, the campus will be a model for future schools. Svigals + Partners was fortunate to have enough acreage to weave security measures into the surrounding landscape. That's not a luxury enjoyed by all schools, particularly those in urban settings. But the new Sandy Hook has lessons for all schools. For example, the ground floor is elevated a few feet about the ground. An assailant approaching from outside will be lower than anyone he might wish to harm. And students can still learn in classrooms with big windows, nice views, and plenty of light. “It’s not a barbed wire fence, it’s a combination of natural elements,” Brotman says. “You have to look at this through the eyes of the children who would be attending it.”