Exits Exist, and Not Enough of Them

I should warn anyone reading this that partway through it gets pretty dark, and addresses the subject of school shootings.

I was a substitute teacher, yesterday, at the luxury high school, which is my preferred subbing location. When I see on my substitute teaching app that someone needs to go there and fill in for a real teacher, I scramble to claim that eight-hour job for myself. I want to spend the day at the luxury high school. I want to make a little money supervising its well-behaved teens.

You might be asking yourself what’s so great about the luxury high school? What makes the high school luxurious?

It’s not a private high school. It’s not like that. I don’t think I’d want to go there if it were private. Those places tend to attract the wealthy, and while plenty of wealthy kids are lovely people, the ones who aren’t are worse than the not-lovely kids of the middle and lower classes. Or the rich ones bother me more, at least.

The luxury high school is one of the public high schools in our district, and I don’t know how it works exactly, but apparently students can elect to attend the luxury school instead of one of the other two that we have. People tell me the luxury high school is “more project-oriented” than the other schools, but no matter how many times I hear those words, I can never seem to figure out what they mean. I nod and say, “Yeah, that makes sense,” but I don’t know what anyone is talking about.

The thing I like most about subbing at the luxury school is that the students there are for the most part calm and focused. They do their work quietly, which means I can work on my own stuff. I take my laptop over there and do what I would do at home, except in this other location, and I get paid to be there. I have to stand up and walk around the room, and make it look like I’m a real authority figure from time to time, but mostly I can just sit and work. I get more done there than I do at home. Everybody wins.

The luxury high school is more relaxed than other schools. When I’m in the room with students, the noise level increases from time to time, but it has not yet reached a point where I feel I need to tell everyone to quiet down, to focus on work. I can let them be. I may not love that they’re talking to each other about stupid bullshit; maybe I would prefer it if they did their work. But they talk about stupid bullshit at acceptable volumes, and years after I graduated high school, I remember the stupid bullshit conversations more fondly than I recall any work I did there.

Why not let the students generate those memories, when their usual teacher is away? Why not give them a couple hours off? It’s not like the teachers leave me instructions that forbid the formation of fond memories. It’s not like if the students did their work they would solve climate change.

Having conversations with one’s peers is itself a kind of education. Everything you do in a school is part of your education—which is something that took me many years of schooling to really understand. The little things are as important as the big things. It all accumulates.

The luxury high school is more like a college than the other schools, in that students have a little more freedom than they have elsewhere. Throughout the building are small rooms with glass walls and conference tables. You can walk past and see what’s going on inside, and make sure no one is making bombs or solving climate change when they’re not supposed to. These “flex spaces” are where students can get away from their peers, if they work better in isolation. They can work in one with a student from another class.

I’m impressed with the architecture of the place, with the building itself and the atmosphere it makes possible. About a third of the classrooms don’t even have doors, they’re large recesses in the hallway with comfortable seating.

I heard from someone that the luxury high school was supposed to be an office complex when it was built, but was then repurposed as a school. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would explain why, unlike most schools, it’s not a death trap.

I’m impressed more than anything by how many exits the luxury high school has leading out of it. I thought of this yesterday when I was in a room on the second floor. I realized that if there was an emergency—if something life-threatening, or someone life-threatening, were in the building—I could escape from the threat several ways. I could leave the classroom and go right, down the hall, and descend the stairs to an exit. I could go left, where ten feet away there was a broad staircase going up and down, and a big front entrance I could escape through. At the foot of that broad staircase, too, is a big cafeteria with multiple doors that lead outside. If I had to, though, I could rush past that broad middle staircase and continue to yet another stairwell. I could make it to the bottom floor and get out that way.

In the short story collection I published in 2020, I included a novella called “Gunmen,” which takes place in a near-future in which all teachers are required to be armed when in their classrooms. In the course of writing it, I had the narrator reason out that it would be much more useful to put more exits in classroom buildings than it would be to add more guns to them. It was one of those things where I started writing out an idea in the voice of a character, only to realize I was speaking for myself.

I haven’t looked into school shooters much; I can only be so interested in what goes on in some people’s minds. But I know that at least some of them are in competition with their violent forebears—that the goal some of them have is essentially to kill more people than any other shooter has. And I know there are other reasons why these monsters go to schools to carry out their massacres, but a school is one of the only kinds of places where you know you can find, in the middle of the day, rooms full of people that have only one exit. Enter a classroom with a gun, and up to thirty people are instantly at your mercy. There’s no way out except the way they came in, and if you’re standing in the doorway they are helpless.

What other buildings are like that? Where else can you go and trap so many people in a room with so little effort?

Movie theaters come to mind—and at least one of those has been the site of a massacre—but they have more than one exit, and it’s rare that a movie is popular enough, now, that you can reliably open fire in one and hit a lot of people. Hospitals are full of patients and caregivers, but those buildings have many exits. So do office complexes and shopping centers. It seems to me that schools are unique in that the people inside them are extremely vulnerable to mass murderers.

I realize I’m being awfully morbid, here, on a Wednesday morning. What I’m getting around to saying is that I think part of why I like going to the luxury high school is that I feel safer there than I do in other school buildings, and it’s because of the number of exits. If someone comes stalking down the hall with a rifle, I have a better chance of making it out of there alive than I do at any other school in the district. I think maybe you can feel that, in the place’s atmosphere.

I’m convinced that on some level everyone in every school building is conscious of the possibility—even if it’s an improbability—that today could be the day when the worst thing comes to pass, and more than a handful of students and teachers don’t get out of the building alive. The luxury high school is less tense than other schools I’ve been to recently, and I have to wonder if it’s because the students there have reason to feel safer there than students at other schools. They are more protected against a threat that most schools are still, decades after Columbine, not built to account for.

I’ve more or less given up any hope of seeing, in my lifetime, a repeal of the second amendment, or some other meaningful action being taken to make it harder for people with guns to murder children in schools. And so what I’d like to see, if we can’t have something like that, is a national initiative to add an exit to the outside world from every classroom in the United States.

A team of engineers could design a new kind of window for classrooms at ground level. The window comes off with the press of a button, creating a way out for students in danger.

If a school building has more than a couple of windowless classrooms, tear it down and rebuild it, or repurpose those rooms so no one is ever trapped there.

If a classroom is upstairs, install a fire escape, or repurpose the inflatable slides that come out of airplanes. Make it possible for everyone inside to get out fast.

We could come up with a system for scoring the safety of school buildings, using as a metric the number of seconds it would take to get every student out of the building. If it takes more than a minute, the building is not safe. Federal money could go to addressing this urgent matter. We could finally spend large sums of money on schools, and it wouldn’t mean turning them into fortresses.

I’d really rather make all of the guns disappear, than have to do all of that, but since it looks as if the guns and their owners will never leave the rest of us in peace, we should at least admit we’re at their mercy and rebuild the country with the threat of a pointless death from gunfire in mind. If we’re going to just shrug and admit that ours is a uniquely bloodthirsty society, we can at least make it less likely for kids to get slaughtered here. It would beat what we’ve been doing all along, which is nothing whatsoever.