[JohnnyB]

In my experience in East Asia it's common to have high school walls around the entire perimeter of the school grounds and just one or two gates with guards offices there to control who comes in and out throughout the day along with security cameras around school grounds. You find this in some private schools here in Canada too where security of the students is a higher concern.

The result is that security is fairly tight entering or exiting school grounds (no wandering off campus with friends during lunch break as I always did growing up), but inside the school grounds doors aren't kept locked and recently built/renovated schools classrooms often have large windows onto school hallways and large windows in the doors themselves to maximize visibility into classrooms. You can have a really open, safe and free environment inside. I can't imagine having to give up that kind of free, open, safe school campus environment in a primary school for locked doors, restricted movement or bunker-styled classrooms as apparently already is the case with some US schools.

After some high-profile school stabbings while I was in China, government required increased security at schools nationally, and some primary schools or kindergartens I would visit had guards in full riot armor at the gates with very restrictive access for anyone other than staff. This was kind of jarring, but at least the inside of school grounds could still be kept as safe environments for kids unaffected by fear. That safe school environment where educators and kids can purely focus on learning was sacred and protected.

Improving perimeter security with walls, gates, and guards obviously wouldn't be a replacement for gun legislation, but while that intractable issue remains intractable it would at least seem a better long-term initiative than having generations of kids growing up in schools with paranoid policies such as locked steel classroom doors and teachers armed with guns. That's not what schools should be.