LAKE COUNTY, Fla – Lake County Schools will begin switching out locks on elementary school campuses in order to ensure student safety.
Once school lets out for summer, Lake County Schools Director of Security and Safety, Joseph Mabry tells us they’ll begin the project.
Mabry said they will change out locks on an estimated 1,000 doors across 20 elementary school campuses. With the new locks, any time a door is shut, the door is locked.
“What we’re trying to do is take the human error out of that by putting storeroom function locks on all of our locks for our classroom doors and other instructional spaces such as the media center, cafeterias, so that they cannot unlock from the outside,” Mabry said.
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Mabry said locked doors were always a part of the district’s best practices but said they wanted to add the new locks to add an extra layer of protection.
“We’ve always had it as a best practice because it is the number one deterrent to turn away anyone who’s looking to do harm,” Mabry said. “Because people that want to do bad things on a campus look for ease of access and so we’re just trying to restrict that.”
In total, Mabry said the project for elementary schools is expected to cost $196,000 but will be paid for through grant funding specifically aimed to help harden schools.
“We receive a hardening grant each year from the state, and that’s based on a school security risk assessment that is conducted where we can identify those other areas where we can provide those protective layers to harden our schools more,” Mabry said. “We have in the past, we’ve done perimeter fencing, single point entry, we have focused on hardening our interior vestibules at the main office. This is another project that is in year seven of the grant that we have identified as a need to just further harden our campuses.”
Mabry said once the elementary schools are finished, the plan is to do the same with middle schools in 2026 and high schools in 2027 depending on grant funding.
As for why they started with elementary schools, Mabry said it’s because they have more elementary schools than middle and high schools.
“Twenty elementary schools, we have 10 middle schools and eight high schools,” Mabry said. “So we could spread the money a little further with this project, with the grant money that we had, because we don’t know from year to year how much we’re going to awarded from the state.”
Mabry said the goal is to have the project finished by the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year.