Summary

In Chapter 13 entitled “That’s Twenty-Nine Thousand Dollars a Kid,” Cox faces the fact that the school safety industry is now big business. He travels in July 2018 to the National School Safety Conference in Orlando and learns about products as diverse as three-hundred-pound white boards that can stop a bullet and high-tech armored classroom doors. He questions the efficacy of many of the products and notes that what evidence there exists for their use is quite sparse. Thus, Cox remains skeptical of many of the products he sees: “It’s also likely that some percentage of products and services for sale at the Orlando expo actually would save lives, but without good research (the same kind that, more than a decade ago, showed the effectiveness of lockdown drills that strictly followed best practices), schools will continue to invest blindly in what they guess...