Protective glass for schools

In the two years since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, schools across the United States have become more serious about safety.

They have bought familiar items like surveillance cameras, panic buttons and key-card entry systems. More recent innovations include bulletproof whiteboards to help teachers shield students inside classrooms and a smartphone app that starts a school lockdown with the swipe of a finger. One suggested strategy for preventing school tragedies is to delay attackers outside school buildings until law enforcement officers arrive at the scene. To that end, a start-up company in Adams, Massachusetts, called School Guard Glass has invented a strong glass intended to thwart intruders for a minimum of four to six minutes.

For context, it took the first police officer about three minutes to get to Sandy Hook Elementary School after the initial 911 call, and, within the next minute, several more officers arrived. Once there, they discovered a gaping hole, created by gunfire, in a window next to the front door.

The idea for School Guard Glass came just two weeks after the Sandy Hook shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 children and six staff members. Christopher Kapiloff, a co-owner of his family's business, Kapiloff's Glass, couldn't shake his lingering fears about the dangers to other schoolchildren, not least his own.

"For three days, I couldn't sleep," Kapiloff says of his reaction to the shooting. "I internalised it to a degree I've never internalised an event like that before."

Because he was in the glass-installation business, it didn't escape him that the Newtown killer had entered Sandy Hook by shooting through a window. A majority of the clients of Kapiloff's Glass are businesses and schools, but for the last decade it has also teamed up with a materials lamination company, the LTI Group, which makes a variety of products, including a polycarbonate plastic coated with glass that is resistant to bullets and bomb blasts. "Our company has installed doors for the federal government that you could stand five feet away from with an AK-47," Kapiloff says. "You could put 30 rounds right into the centre of the glass and not one would penetrate the door."

Given his experience with schools and high-security buildings, Kapiloff took on the challenge he couldn't shake from his mind: finding an affordable way to keep violent intruders out of schools for those crucial first few minutes.

Working with the LTI Group, he began developing a thin glass that, while it can crack, stays intact when bullets or blunt objects like bats or sledgehammers strike it.

The glass, which has a strong centre, functions more like the bulletproof glass found in banks and other high-security buildings than the tempered glass that's commonly used in car windows - or that crumbled into pieces at Sandy Hook Elementary School. But whereas bulletproof glass is typically thick, heavy and expensive, the School Guard Glass is relatively thin and lightweight. Bulletproof glass ranges from three-quarters of an inch to 3 3/4 inches in thickness; installing it in a door requires a door heavy enough to support the weight of the glass. By contrast, School Guard Glass is a quarter-inch thick, and the price per door, including installation, is about $1,000 to $1,200. The glass is lightweight enough that it can be used to replace glass in existing doors and window panes.

Kapiloff would not reveal the exact contents of the glass, except to say the secret ingredient is in the inner layer. "It's very effective in mitigating blast damage," he says, adding that he has applied for several patents. But according to Jim Crumbley, an independent school security expert and a volunteer with the nonprofit Security Industry Association, different schools require different safety measures. "If you have drug deals and gang activity in the school, a functioning camera system is a better investment than specialised glass on front doors," he says. "You have to look at the whole system before you start implementing pieces here and there."