WASHINGTON _ Amid the rolling farmland of southwest Iowa sits the 7,800-population town of Creston, where the school district boasts of a "state-of-the-art school safety and security system" with a command center to monitor nearly 200 cameras, or roughly one for every seven students.
But the school superintendent isn't done yet, thanks to a $500,000 grant from a program Congress stuffed into an omnibus spending bill a year ago. He plans to buy mobile metal detectors that could also be set up at football games, a shooter alert system that can sense when a gun goes off in one of the three schools and notify police, a "panic button" system and a new entry system.
"We have a lot of money invested already in our safety and security, but this will really round out and really advance what we're doing in terms of tightening up security," superintendent Steve McDermott told Radio Iowa in December.
Communities across the country are starting to spend the first of nearly $1 billion over 10 years that Congress designated a year ago to improve school safety after the deaths of 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school _ the only federal law to address mass shootings at schools.
Most of the federal funds and the grant application process itself spawned response teams of law enforcement, mental health and school officials to help troubled students, training programs on violence prevention and assessments on how to make schools safer, a review of those grants found.
But the new law also has accelerated the country's broader, more physical approach to what has been a uniquely American problem, by hardening of the nation's schools with the kind of sally ports and surveillance equipment more closely associated with bank vaults or prisons.
The education sector of the U.S. market for security equipment and services is expected to stay around $2.8 billion through 2021, according to a widely cited analysis by IHS Markit, a global industry information firm. Voters are passing referendums to fund school security, and most state education departments offer school safety grants. The federal money is layered on top.
Joseph Erardi, the former school superintendent in Newtown, Conn., who oversaw the construction of a new Sandy Hook school after the 2012 shooting deaths of 20 first-graders and six educators, said superintendents feel an "inordinate amount of pressure to do something."
"You don't want your school to feel like corrections, yet you want to do your best to have a safe environment for teachers and kids," Erardi said.
Schools are generally safe places, and a government study found that students are 87 times more likely to die by murder or suicide outside of school, said Bryan Warnick, a professor of educational studies at The Ohio State University who has written about school shootings. There's no evidence such hardening makes schools safer, he said. Rather, it is correlated with increased fear among students and staff.
"And yet we have this climate of fear, and it makes these tiny districts in Iowa think they have to bend over backwards and create Fort Knox to keep their kids safe," Warnick said.
