GLENCOE, Illinois — On a wet December afternoon, Emma Donnelly leads a class of 4- and 5-year-olds down a muddy path at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The kids jump into puddles, climb trees and roll in dirt before running up a hill overlooking a lake where they spot a small animal swimming. 

“What’s that swimming in the water over there?” Donnelly says to her class. “Is that an otter or maybe a muskrat?”

Soon, everyone is holding a pair of binoculars to better examine the critter. The outdoor adventure isn’t a field trip for these preschoolers but part of their normal routine. The children are enrolled in the Chicago Botanic Garden Nature Preschool and spend most of the day outside.

It’s part of a growing trend of nature-based preschools that have sprouted up across the country and received more interest since the coronavirus pandemic began.

In 2017, 275 nature preschools operated in the United States, according to a  from the Natural Start Alliance, a nature preschool advocacy organization within the nonprofit North American Association for Environmental Education. By 2020, that number more than doubled to 585 programs.

“Certainly, the pandemic has supported that; I think it’s supported the expansion of outdoor programming in elementary schools as well,” said Kit Harrington, a policy adviser for the Natural Start Alliance. “But I think increasingly what we’re seeing, particularly in the policy sphere as well, is obviously teachers are on the ground. They see this as a means of responding to the mental health crisis for children.”

The trend — along with studies showing the benefits of outdoor playtime — has inspired state officials to examine how to license such schools, a move that could unlock state funding to help children and programs in underserved communities.

Illinois boasted more than 20 nature preschools as of 2020, but Washington state ranked among the top states with more than 50, according to the Natural Start Alliance report. Washington also has led the way with legislation: In 2021, it became the first state in the nation to  outdoor preschools.

That law followed a pilot program that helped develop  for schools — detailing weather policies, risk assessment, classroom ratios and curriculum, as well as requirements for indoor spaces. There are strict parameters outlining emergency weather conditions. Teachers must find emergency shelter for children if there are lightning storms or winds over 25 mph, if the temperature exceeds 100 degrees or dips below 20, or if a natural disaster hits. 

With standards in place, eligible families now can use subsidies from Washington’s Working Connections Child Care program to help pay for nature-based child care, and schools can participate in the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program.

When Democratic state Sen. Claire Wilson sat down with the founder of Tiny Trees, an outdoor preschool that participated in the pilot program, her first question concerned accessibility.

“We have programs that families take their children to, but they’re usually two hours or three hours, and again, very much not reflective of our communities,” said Wilson, the author of the preschool licensing bill. “Hence became the conversation: What do we need to do in order to make it accessible? And licensing was a big deal.”

The rules around when programs require a license vary across the country, according to Harrington. In most states, including Washington, preschools need a license depending on how many hours the school operates, she said.

The preschool at the Chicago Botanic Garden is licensed, though it’s not required for nonprofits and parks districts in Illinois, said Ann Halley, director of the school’s early childhood programs and preschool director.

Donnelly, who also worked at the St. Louis Zoo Preschool in Missouri before moving to Illinois, still hopes that other states enact comprehensive licenses using Washington state as a model.

“There’s a real need for it nationwide rather than just state by state,” she said. “Washington’s a really good place to start.”

Although the number of outdoor preschools has exploded over the past five years, the rise does not correlate to an increase in legislation at the state level.

In 2020, Illinois Democratic state Sen. Ram Villivalam introduced  that would have required the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to create an outdoor preschool pilot program.

Neither bill has moved forward since 2021.

Navigating the licensing landscapes remains a significant barrier in every state, said Liz Houston, deputy director of partnerships and development at Early Childhood Health Outdoors, an initiative of the National Wildlife Federation. 

Creating a curriculum that is age appropriate and grounded in good science also has proven difficult since there’s a lack of data on outdoor preschools, she added.

“It’s such an emerging field, and there’s just not a lot of research,” Houston said.

In Washington state, Republican Sen. Ron Muzzall didn’t take issue with outdoor preschool. But he and others in the GOP voted against the legislation since it was wrapped up in an omnibus bill that included other policies that they opposed.

“When it comes to outdoor preschool, I don’t think there’s anything the matter with it. I think it’s a good thing,” Muzzall said.

In Colorado, the state lacks the dedicated funding that Washington won, but its Department of Early Childhood is drafting a rule package to increase access to outdoor preschool. Emergency shelters and sanitation are top-of-mind questions for outdoor preschools, but so are thornier issues, like whether a camping knife is a developmentally appropriate tool for young children, said Mary Alice Cohen, deputy executive director of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.

“Our primary goal is to utilize the Washington standards and from there, build a rule package that is appropriate and relevant to Colorado,” Cohen said. “Because we have a different climate, it’s just a different landscape.”

Advocates hope that the new law in Washington will help solve some of the equity and inclusion issues that outdoor preschools around the country have confronted. However, it’s a misconception that financial diversity will automatically lead to other forms of diversity, said Khavin Debbs, executive director of Tiny Trees Preschool. When the school opened in 2016, Debbs said, he noticed that most of the students were White and male at Tiny Trees’ four locations across the Puget Sound region.

“I live in this area. I know the people who are here predominantly,” Debbs said of his neighborhood in southeast Seattle. “This is not representative of that. We’re clearly doing something wrong.”

Tiny Trees markets itself as an  and recently hired consultants to conduct anti-racism training, Debbs said.

“My goal is to not rest on our laurels and to continue to have these conversations to make it even more diverse,” he said.

At least one researcher is probing whether being outdoors helps children or whether those participating in outdoor preschool benefit from other types of privilege. Amber Fyfe-Johnson, an assistant research professor at Washington State University,  last year of nearly 300 studies examining the effects of time spent outside on children of all ages.

The review found that green spaces had a positive effect on children’s physical activity, cognition, behavior and mental health. However, the study represented only a brief snapshot, Fyfe-Johnson said.

“Are kids healthier because they’ve been existing in a nature-rich environment, or do people who are already healthy have the opportunity to live in a nature-rich environment?” she said.

Using Tiny Trees as her laboratory, Fyfe-Johnson is conducting a five-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health evaluating the effects of outdoor preschool on health outcomes in childhood. The study, which will conclude this June, looks at 100 children attending Tiny Trees and 100 children attending an indoor preschool, but who were waitlisted at Tiny Trees. About 60% of families involved in the study qualify for free or reduced tuition and 40% are families of color, she said.

In addition to research on physical health, stress and cognition, her research will measure the difference in gut microbiomes for children touching dirt versus those who are inside playing with toys on sanitized tabletops.

COVID-19 has never interrupted Fyfe-Johnson’s data collection since Tiny Trees experienced only a brief pause at the start of the pandemic. That’s the standard for most nature preschools, which had the built-in benefit of operating outside.

Epidemiologists have cautioned, however, that as newer variants emerge, they may transmit  outside. In general, people’s risk remains lower outside versus confined spaces, said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist and associate professor at University of California, Irvine. But he’s concerned about harsher climates like Chicago’s.

“I’m just frankly skeptical of how sustainable and practical this is,” he said. “In theory, it should result in fewer sick kids, but I’d really like to see a study.”

Despite the outdoor setting, the class at the Chicago Botanic Garden isn’t immune to the myriad of colds and respiratory illnesses that plague the typical preschool classroom: About half of the 14-person class had shown up that December afternoon and had masked to prevent further infection.

For parents such as Kelly Lee, the perceived drawbacks of traditional schools made outdoor preschool appear more attractive. Lee, who previously taught third grade, felt many preschools were emphasizing academics rather than play.

“They’re working on the whole person with the ability to problem-solve, whether it’s the weather or peers, ability to cope and calm themselves and find calm in nature,” Lee said. “So, like the things that a lot of us maybe realized in COVID.”

Lee’s son Ollie can’t read yet, but she’s confident that the curriculum taught at the outdoor preschool has prepared him. Scott Heston, who has an 18- and 21-year-old who went through traditional school, echoed that sentiment about his preschool daughter, Elodie.

“I don’t know what my child is gonna decide to do with her life. But if she’s going to be an engineer, she’s going to spend a lot of years in school,” Heston said. “I want her to be the engineer that knows the importance of spiders rather than just how many parking lots you need for a three-story office building.”

Heston acknowledged the high cost of proper clothing for outdoor preschool and scours eBay for gently used snowsuits that he knows his daughter will outgrow quickly. He worried how Elodie would adapt to the weather.

His only concern moving forward may be how long he can keep her in an outdoor school. While Elodie was watching the TV show “Daniel Tiger” with her little sister one day, she noticed something different about the main character’s school.

“She looked at me, and she said, ‘Daniel Tiger goes to school indoors,’” Heston said. “And she kind of looked out the window for a minute, said, ‘I don’t want to go to school indoors.’ So, we’ve looked around for [outdoor] schools that go for longer.”

Child vaccination rates dipped into dangerous territory during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when schools were shuttered, and most doctors were only seeing emergency patients.

But instead of recovering after schools reopened in 2021, those historically low rates worsened, according to new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Experts fear that the skepticism of science and distrust of government that flared up during the pandemic are contributing to the decrease.

According to today’s data, the percentage of U.S. children entering kindergarten with their required immunizations fell to 93% in the 2021-22 school year, 2 percentage points below recommended herd immunity levels of 95% and lower than vaccination rates , when many schools and doctor’s offices were closed.

“While 1 percentage point might not seem concerning, that one percent represents tens of thousands of children who are inadequately protected from diseases we can easily prevent through immunization,” said Dr. Michelle Fiscus, chief medical officer at the Association of Immunization Managers, a nonprofit group of state officials who direct vaccination efforts. 

“This national trend is alarming, especially as we see outbreaks of measles in Ohio among children who are too young to be vaccinated and those who are inadequately vaccinated. We need all hands on deck to get these children protected,” Fiscus said.

Public health officials warn that unless child vaccination rates for measles, chicken pox, polio and other diseases are quickly brought back to pre-pandemic levels, outbreaks of preventable diseases — like the measles outbreaks in  and  in the fall and the polio case in  last summer — are likely to become commonplace.

While COVID-related disruptions in schools and the health care system may be the primary cause for this recent drop in immunization rates, they’re only part of the reason state-required vaccination rates are trending downward, public health experts say.

They say the politicization of public health and increasing distrust of government have skewed parents’ previously positive attitudes about vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, tetanus, diphtheria, polio and other childhood diseases that have been all but eradicated. 

“I’m trembling in my anxiety about this,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

“Our own success in immunizing children routinely, uniformly against a whole list of diseases that used to be common has resulted in the current generation of moms and dads not knowing much about these diseases, if anything,” he said.

“If you don’t fear the disease and respect the vaccines,” he added, “you may not adhere to state laws requiring them.”

In general, the public’s willingness to follow public health requirements has been waning since the COVID-19 pandemic began, said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers.

The political divisiveness that erupted over COVID quarantines, masking and vaccines, he said, may be spilling over into what has been a widely accepted public health policy of protecting children from infectious diseases.

The CDC  that vaccinating children born from 1994 to 2018 will prevent 472 million illnesses, nearly 30 million hospitalizations and more than a million deaths. The state-run vaccination programs are also projected to save $479 billion in health care and other direct costs.

In 2019, a single measles outbreak of 72 cases in Washington state cost $3.4 million, CDC researchers , with most of the costs incurred by local public health agencies.

State immunization rates vary widely. For the 2021-22 school year, Alaska, the District of Columbia, Wisconsin, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky and Ohio had the lowest rates. New York, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Delaware, California, Massachusetts and Nebraska had the highest rates.

Changing Mandates

All 50 states and the District of Columbia require children to be vaccinated for childhood diseases before entering kindergarten, whether at a public or private school. Every state allows medical exceptions, and most allow parents to seek an exemption for religious or philosophical reasons.

Public health officials argue that the best way for states to boost their child vaccination rates is to enact ironclad vaccine mandates with no exceptions other than for medical reasons, such as for children who are undergoing cancer therapy.

Mississippi and West Virginia, which have such strict vaccine mandates, have had among the highest vaccine rates in the nation for decades. 

California did away with its non-medical vaccine exemptions in 2015, followed by Maine and New York in 2019 and Connecticut in 2021. West Virginia’s vaccine mandate never included non-medical exemptions, and Mississippi’s law was stripped of non-medical exemptions in 1979 after the state Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.

California repealed its non-medical exemptions in reaction to high-profile measles outbreaks in 2014 and 2015, including one that started at Disneyland. After the law took effect, measles, mumps and rubella coverage rose by 3.3%, which put California closer to the herd immunity vaccination threshold of 95% for measles.

With most state vaccine mandates in place by the 1980s, the CDC declared victory over measles in 2000.

But in recent years, the diagnosis numbers have crept upward: In 2014, 667 measles cases were reported to the CDC. In 2019, state health departments reported 1,274 measles cases.

Even so, childhood vaccination rates in the United States remained high relative to other developed countries, and public attitudes toward routine childhood vaccines were relatively positive.

But since the COVID-19 pandemic began, state vaccine requirements have met more opposition. In October, a poll conducted by the Harvard Opinion Research Program showed that support for vaccination requirements to enter school had slipped to 74%, compared with 84% in 2019.

A  published by the Kaiser Family Foundation in November showed that 28% of respondents said parents should be able to opt out of vaccinating their school-age children even if it results in health risks for others.

That’s up from only 16% who responded the same way in a 2019 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds the center and Stateline.)

In the past two years, dozens of bills have been proposed that would make it easier for parents to opt out of routine vaccinations for their school-age children, as well as COVID-19 shots, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state legislation.

In 2021, Kentucky and Florida enacted laws allowing parents to refuse routine vaccinations and still enroll their children in school.

Enforcement and Access

In addition to tightening vaccination mandates, public health officials say some states need to better enforce their rules and increase education and community messaging, so parents better understand the importance of vaccinating their children.

Measles, for example, is far more contagious than COVID-19. It typically infects 9 out of 10 people an infected person encounters, and the contagion can linger in a room for at least two hours after an infected person leaves. 

Although most measles cases resolve within a week, it is a potentially life-threatening respiratory disease that often results in hospitalization. In , for example, 33 of the 82 children with measles last year were hospitalized.

Dr. Anne Zink, chief medical officer for Alaska’s Department of Health and president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, said improving access to pediatricians, family doctors and other health professionals who can administer childhood vaccines is another way states can get more children vaccinated.

Pediatricians and family doctors typically provide immunization shots to children between 12 and 23 months. But for children who miss their vaccinations in their first two years and need to get caught up, some states set up local vaccine drives at schools and use mobile vaccination units to serve local communities.

Matt Guido, research coordinator for Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel at the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said states should consider taking advantage of the infrastructure established for ramping up COVID-19 vaccinations and call on some of the same community leaders to help parents get their kids vaccinated before they start school next year. 

This story was originally published by , an initiative of .

What’s for lunch?

For millions of school students, the answer may be fresh lettuce and tomatoes, apples and carrots grown by nearby farmers, or, in a few states, fresh lamb or haddock, raised or caught locally.

Local foods, once rare on school lunch trays, are gradually becoming more available in school cafeterias as states promote fresh produce, legumes, meats and fish.

Farm-to-school programs aim to improve the quality of school lunches and educate students about nutrition and where their food comes from. Programs also provide new markets for growers, which can strengthen local economies. Nearly all states have a farm-to-school program, but at least 10 states enacted laws this year or last boosting theirs, though some measures faced opposition over increased food costs.

When restaurants closed during the pandemic, small farmers, ranchers and fishermen found farm-to-school programs a lifeline.

“COVID hit us pretty hard. It was a major setback,” said Phil Raymond, a first-generation farmer who grows artisan lettuces, microgreens and herbs in Okemos, Michigan, near East Lansing. His regular customers, including restaurants, country clubs and caterers, cut back or stopped ordering altogether.

Raymond, who with three friends founded Blue Mitten Hydroponic Farms in 2016 and is general manager and sales manager, had never thought of selling to schools.

“We didn’t know that was an option. We figured they went with the big distributors,” he said in an interview.

Then he connected with 10 Cents a Meal for Michigan’s Kids and Farms, a state farm-to-school program that matches funding for what schools spend on Michigan-grown fruits, vegetables and legumes with grants up to 10 cents a meal.

Now Raymond delivers weekly four-variety, mixed-case lettuce to four or five school districts in his county.

“It’s quite a lot of lettuce — more than we expected,” he said.

In addition to Michigan, states that passed legislation this year or in 2021 to expand farm-to-school programs include California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming, according to the National Farm to School Network. The nonprofit advocates for local food and nutrition education for children and for strengthening family farms and communities.

Hawaii’s new law requires public schools and other state institutions to spend at least 10% of their food dollars locally by 2025, with increases up to at least 50% by 2050. In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Buy American Food Act earlier this week, which requires certain schools to buy American foods unless they are at least 25% higher in price than imports.

In California and around the country, farm-to-school programs face several hurdles, including potentially higher food costs, shortages of staff to prepare the local foods and sometimes a lack of available farmers. California state education groups opposed the legislation, saying it would lead to price gouging and unaffordable, increased costs for school districts.

“Well-intentioned but harmful” is how the coalition of education groups described the bill.

Michigan’s 10 Cents a Meal program started as a pilot project in eight counties in the 2016-2017 school year with a $250,000 budget. The Michigan legislature has continued to grow the program, doubling state funding last year and again this year, to $9.3 million for 2022-2023. It now serves 585,000 students in 57 of 83 counties.

“The 10 Cents a Meal program feeds our kids and supports family farmers and growers,” said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, when she signed the bill in July. “As we continue our economic jumpstart, we have to make sure everyone has the resources and support they need to succeed.”

Nearly every U.S. state and territory has a farm-to-school program and, while programs vary, each includes at least one of these elements: local food procurement, food education or school gardens, according to the National Farm to School Network.

Some states buy only fresh produce, while others include dairy, meat and grains. Coastal states, such as Maine and Massachusetts, include fish.

While studies have not conclusively shown improved academic achievement or increased fruit and vegetable consumption, research has shown students are more likely to try new foods in a farm-to-school setting.

An added benefit of farm-to-school programs for school food services is reliability.

“We’ve really seen great strides with the program. Especially with supply chain issues, schools that have a relationship with local growers are having an easier time getting their groceries,” Wendy Crowley, the Farm to School Program consultant for the Michigan Department of Education and lead contact for grantees, said in an interview.

Farm-to-school began with a few schools in different states in the late 1990s, then started rolling with the federal Farm to School grant program in 2013. The federal government has delivered nearly $75 million in grants, reaching more than 25 million students in nearly 60,000 schools.

The nation’s schools bought more than $1.2 billion in local foods in the 2018-2019 school year, about 20% of their food budget, and milk accounted for more than half of what they ordered locally. That’s according to the 2019 Farm to School Census, the most recent survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service.

Challenges to using local foods include cost — local is more expensive — as well as the staff and space needed to prepare the foods and the difficulty finding local suppliers, the survey found.

Maine schools rarely serve fresh fish, even though Maine is a coastal state, because of the cost, said Robin Kerber, coordinator of the state’s Farm and Sea to School program. The high cost also means many children may not see fresh fish on their dinner plates and don’t know whether they like it.

“There are a lot of communities where the parents are fishermen or lobstermen, but the family can’t afford to eat it,” she said in an interview.

After restaurants closed due to the pandemic in 2020, Maine used COVID-19 relief money to help fishermen sell fish. The state created a Local Foods Fund (formerly the Local Produce Fund) to match school districts $1 for every $3 up to $7,500 spent on produce, value-added dairy, protein or minimally processed foods.

The Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association donates excess fresh haddock, hake, monkfish and pollock from their catches to a location in Portland where schools pick up what they need.

The Maine Farm and Sea to School program also promotes local produce, supplies recipes and holds cooking classes and a cook-off.

Trent Emery, a first-generation produce farmer in Wayne, Maine, 17 miles west of Augusta, is a former teacher who started farming exclusively in 2009, first selling as a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) provider and to farmers markets.

To operate his 15-acre Emery Farm and greenhouses year-round, he developed relationships with schools and other institutions and now makes daily deliveries.

Through the Farm and Sea to School program, he delivers seasonal produce — beets to watermelons — to four school districts, for about 10% or 15% of his total business.

“I’d like for more schools to buy from our farm and from farmers in general,” he said.

This year, Vermont increased the budget for the state Farm to School and Early Childhood program to $500,000, and the legislature passed a universal school meals law, so that every child in Vermont is entitled to free school meals.

Nebraska established a farm-to-school program in 2021 and added early childhood education to the program this year.

Last year, Wyoming established the Protein Enhancement Project. A pilot project since 2017, the program has a budget of $25,000 to provide grants to schools to match their cost of processing donated beef, bison, lamb, pork and poultry starting in 2023.

California and Hawaii this year moved to require schools and other state agencies to buy local. Hawaii’s Farm to School law now requires the departments of education, health, public safety, defense and the University of Hawaii system to spend at least 10% of their food dollars on local fresh or local value-added, processed, agricultural food by 2025, with increases every five years, until 50% of food purchases by the departments are local by 2050.

In California, the agricultural community has complained for years that schools buy cheap imports of peaches and other fruit for school lunches, even though Buy American is a federal requirement of the National School Lunch Program, and the state has a Buy California law on the books.

California state Sen. Anna Caballero, a Democrat, sponsored the Buy American Food Act bill that will require state schools, community colleges and state universities, other than the University of California, to buy American foods unless they cost 25% more than imports.

“We have an agricultural industry to protect,” she said in an interview. “We saw what happened during the pandemic when shortages occur. This is a national security issue.”

The law will strengthen federal Buy American policy at the state level while protecting farm workers and the agricultural industry, she said.

The measure had bipartisan legislative support, but the education community pushed back. The California School Boards Association, on behalf of the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association and local school districts, had urged Newsom to veto the bill, saying in a news release the 25% was an “unreasonable standard” that would lead to price gouging as schools implement the new universal free school lunch service.

Vernon Billy, CEO and executive director of the California School Boards Association, declined repeated requests for an interview.

In his statement, Newsom said requests for additional resources will need to be included in the annual budget process.

Caballero said there’s money in the budget to cover the extra cost, though the money is not earmarked, and opponents say it could be used for other school meal costs.  

The law says buying American foods is a requirement, but it includes no penalties.

“This is not a gotcha,” Caballero said. “We’re not looking to make life difficult for the school districts.”

This originally appeared at  and is published here in partnership with the .

In the wake of the devastating shooting in Uvalde, Texas, one of the latest tragedies in a decades-long surge of violence in schools, some state lawmakers are embracing a bipartisan measure that skirts divisive gun debates: school maps and blueprints.

Police, firefighters and emergency technicians often reference those maps when responding to school emergencies. But law enforcement and school safety experts say the maps are frequently inaccurate and out-of-date — potentially lengthening emergency response times.

In the past six months, states including Iowa, New Jersey, Virginia and Wisconsin have launched multimillion-dollar initiatives to correct and digitize school maps and get them in the hands of local law enforcement. An additional 18 states are “actively investing” in digital maps, according to Critical Response Group, Inc., the country’s largest school-mapping contractor.

“For any type of incident — it could be a bee sting — time is of the essence,” said Wisconsin state Rep. Jesse James, a Republican and former police chief who last year co-sponsored a successful bill that encouraged schools to adopt digital maps. “The floor plans that we have now just aren’t adequate.”

But cost and limited awareness remain barriers to adoption for many schools, several education and school safety experts said. And the new mapping initiatives, while often touted as common sense, have not been studied or evaluated the way that other school-safety measures have.

“From a tactical standpoint, there is clearly some value in officers having these maps,” said Cheryl Lero Jonson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Xavier University who researches school shooting interventions. “But I would like to see more research … before we funnel millions of dollars to them.”

To be clear, while the Uvalde massacre has raised interest in digital mapping, there is nothing to indicate the failed multi-agency response there related to officers’ ability to navigate the building.

Outdated Blueprints

Many states have long required that schools share blueprints with law enforcement, a precaution dating back to the aftermath of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. These new programs update that approach by incentivizing schools to create digital or “critical incident” maps — a technique modeled on maps used in special operations missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A critical incident map might include, for example, an aerial view of a school, an overlaid atlas grid, and markers that flag entrances, stairwells, electronic door locks, utility lines, roof access points and bleeding control kits. Once integrated into first responders’ digital systems, both dispatchers and law enforcement can see the exact classroom a 911 caller is in.

“These days, if you look inside a patrol car, more often than not, you’ll see a laptop or other device in there,” said Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. “Being able to pull up digital images and maps right on that device — there’s an advantage, no doubt about it.”

School officials and law enforcement say they can easily update these digital maps to reflect recent changes to school buildings — a stubborn problem with traditional floor plans, which may exist only on microfiche, as PDFs, or as physical drawings in blueprint tubes. Less than 1% of the 1,000 schools Critical Response Group has mapped had accurate floor plans already, said Mike Rodgers, the company’s chief executive.

The labels on conventional blueprints also can cause confusion: They typically use the official names for classrooms and other facilities, instead of the casual or colloquial names used by teachers and students.

“When someone calls 911 and says, ‘Someone has chest pain in the teachers lounge,’ neither the dispatcher nor the officer knows where that is,” Rodgers said. “But under stress, on a 911 call, that’s how people refer to it.”

Leading law enforcement and school safety organizations — including the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools — recommend that administrators routinely update, share and review maps with law enforcement. But many schools have not shared any blueprints with law enforcement, let alone digital ones.

In 2020, a U.S. Department of Justice working group found that school maps often go “overlooked” in plans to protect students. As recently as 2019, a survey by the National Center for School Safety found that 1 in 3 Virginia schools had not provided any kind of electronic floor plan to law enforcement.

Cost has proved a barrier for some districts. A digital or critical incident map by a third-party contractor can cost between roughly $3,500 and $5,000, according to figures released as part of the new state initiatives. And to create such maps in-house, districts may have to invest in costly software and other tools — such as 3D scanners that measure building dimensions and retail for tens of thousands of dollars.

Many districts also “forgot” about mapping after an initial wave of projects in the early 2000s, Canady said. Interest flared up again after the Uvalde massacre, he added.

“Schools aren’t thinking of these things — they’re busy teaching,” said Donna Michaelis, the manager of the Virginia Center for School and Campus Safety and Public Safety Services, which is part of a state agency. “They’re not law enforcement. They’re not thinking of the worst day of their lives. It’s not their job to do that.”

New State Efforts

Virginia’s Digital Mapping Program, which Michaelis oversees, is one of several new initiatives meant to address that gap. In April, the state legislature passed a law requiring that school districts maintain up-to-date maps and floor plans.

Later that month, the state’s Department of Criminal Justice Services announced a $6.5 million grant program that will reimburse school districts up to $3,500 per building to contract for new critical incident maps. “Paper and one-dimensional digital maps are obsolete for today’s school emergencies,” reads one promotion for the program.

So far, 90 of the state’s 132 school divisions — representing about 1,200 of its 1,976 schools — have requested funding or otherwise expressed interest in the program, Michaelis said.

Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin also has touted schools’ strong response to the project: Now “several other states are rushing to address this vital issue as well,” he said in a late September statement.

Those states include Iowa, New Jersey and Wisconsin, all of which have earmarked millions of dollars toward school mapping projects in the past year. In June, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds announced Iowa would direct $6 million of COVID-19 relief funds to a new school mapping project. Two months later, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, announced a similar $6.5 million grant program. New Jersey State Police plan to map 1,320 public and charter schools by the start of the 2023-2024 school year, a spokesperson said.

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, where school districts already are required to share blueprints with law enforcement, a December 2021 law allowed schools to submit critical incident maps instead — and created a $2 million grant program to incentivize the switch. The program, launched in July, will run for two years and grant up to $5,000 per school.

“It’s an opportunity to have the most up-to-date technology available in our schools,” said James, one of the bill’s sponsors. “A lot of schools didn’t know this existed, but they want to take advantage of it now.”

Digital maps have not been studied as a school safety measure, however — a gap that gives some experts and legislators pause. Mapping initiatives seem sensible on their face, said Xavier University’s Cheryl Jonson — particularly in incidents such as fires, where multiple agencies need to coordinate their response. 

But under modern police protocol, Jonson added, the first officer on the scene of a mass shooting enters the school and engages the gunman without first coordinating with other agencies or an incident command center.

In May 2021, Washington state terminated its 19-year-old school mapping program after a study concluded that among other issues, law enforcement responding to school shootings no longer “look at floor plans and move in as one unit.”

Instead of mandating a switch to digital maps, Washington redirected funding to new threat assessment teams, which train teachers and staff to identify at-risk students and intervene before an attack occurs. Some education advocates argue that social-emotional supports make a better investment in school safety, especially with COVID-19 relief dollars.

“We weren’t trying to get rid of a safety feature for kids,” said Washington state Rep. Laurie Dolan, a Democrat and former school district administrator who co-sponsored the legislation. “We’re trying to spend that money more wisely. Mapping is expensive.”

Still, at a time when lawmakers and school officials have intensified efforts to keep schools safe, interest in digital maps appears to be growing.

Michigan also considered a bipartisan critical response mapping bill during the 2022 legislative session. And officials who recently piloted a mapping project in rural Concho Valley, Texas, said they’ve begun meeting with interested state legislators ahead of next year’s session.

They also are in touch with school district administrators in Uvalde, said John Austin Stokes, the executive director of the Concho Valley Council of Governments, which oversaw the pilot project. Administrators there expressed interest in digital mapping after the massacre and failed police response at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, he added.

“I think there’s a lot of interest at the state level because this is something that could get a lot of non-controversial support,” Stokes said. “Mental health gets a lot of attention because everyone can support that. This is one of those solutions that could garner a lot of support, as well.”