A Boston teacher is warning that the public schools’ shelter-in-place system may be compromised by classroom doors that won’t lock — and a city councilor is calling for a district-wide audit to find and fix any doors that would fail to keep out an active shooter.
Melanie Allen, a teacher at the Rafael Hernandez K-8 School in Roxbury, told the Herald that the classroom door next to hers would not lock for at least two years. When the school ran lockdown drills, that teacher would bring her class to Allen’s room through an adjoining door and push a bookshelf in front of that non-locking door.
“We told students that this would keep them safe, but in my head I was thinking, ‘What is that bookshelf going to do?’ ” Allen said. “If we’re going to have these drills, we should be able to lock our doors.”