Pilots Cabin

By: Leslie Droe

In lieu of recent events concerning gun men, schools, and lockdowns, I couldn’t help but find it most necessary to pay a few words to fairly undermined concept: locking doors.

Due to a very recent personal experience, I remembered a joke my class once laughed at in community college when the instructor went over the protocol for lockdowns. “In the case of a lockdown, remain inside the building and lock all doors and windows. Well, I don’t have a key and these doors don’t have locks,” as my instructors would always say. It was until Wednesday night that I learned how true that is.

On the night of Cal State Fullerton’s seven hour lockdown, all major media outlets were buzzing about the armed and potentially dangerous suspect running into Mihaylo Hall thus causing a campus-wide lockdown. To create more of a story, news stations were allowing students to send in pictures of what it looks like from inside the classroom. Aside from the silly faces students would make in the background, many pictures involved barricading doors. While some may have been for a little comic relief, others may have been barricaded since the doors don’t lock.

Sitting in a lecture hall/theater that night wasn’t much better. Imagine having seven sets of double-doors and everything is bolted to the ground. No barricading going on there. Students found that some of the doors have the capability of locking from the inside, but I later learned that giving a couple of the doors a generous push would allow the door to easily pop open. It’s not exactly the peace of mind I was hoping for during a lockdown.

I find, however, for there to be hope for schools yet. While Fullerton isn’t certainly quite up to date with this, I feel it has the potential to be what with this newly-passed Proposition 30. A couple of buildings I’ve visited on campus have made an interesting investment to install proxy boxes for every room, including the bathrooms. Instructors are given proxy to the rooms they require access to throughout the semester. With one scan, it opens the door once but will lock once it closes again and two consecutive scans keeps it unlocked. Another two consecutive scans locks the door. It’s a pretty snappy piece of technology and will certainly save students energy – but certainly not time, since they would have a lot of it – in barricading doors during a lockdown.

Maybe it won’t happen or maybe it will, but as a student of Cal State Fullerton, I don’t want to witness another lockdown in which I didn’t feel safe. While it may be true that a gun man can get into a room if he tried hard enough, having a system which allows the doors to actually lock during a lock down would put a student’s mind – and bladder, as bathrooms are located outside of the rooms, I also realized – at ease.

*As one more side note pertaining to the lock down:

- Anyone who thinks it might be exciting to be part of a lock down, it’s a real hoot for the first couple hours. Then at the third hour the excitement begins to die. At the fourth hour you’ll begin to wonder if they forgot about you. At the fifth hour you’ll be texting people in other areas of the campus to discover the SWAT team was eating pizza at Langsdorf Hall. Finally by six hours, you’ll be peeping your head out the door to beg the SWAT team member to let you go home.