RIGHT SPEAK: New Safety Measures will Greet Students in Many American Schools This Year

Public schools nationwide are greeting students for the fall term with a host of new security measures, as administrators' efforts to safeguard their districts show no sign of waning in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

The idea of "hardening" schools against intruders took on urgency after the December 2012 killing of 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Conn., with districts considering a variety of measures, from adding armed guards or giving guns to employees to installing perimeter fencing and bulletproof glass.

Students return through security gates to Orange
Grove Middle Magnet School in Tampa, Fla., this
month. Edward Linsmier for The Wall Street Journal

"Newtown was a nuclear bomb that changed the whole landscape of everything just because of the magnitude of it," said Jamie Grime, superintendent of Montpelier Exempted Village Schools in northwestern Ohio. "Security has always been an issue, but maybe not a huge issue. Now it is."

Mr. Grime was one of several officials at three schools across the country interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in January 2013 about how they were responding to the Sandy Hook shooting.

Now, as students return for the new academic year, all three districts report they have boosted safety provisions—after grappling with budget concerns and balancing the desire to keep students safe while not creating fortresses.

In the beginning of 2013, officials at Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa, Fla., said plans to hire more than 130 officers for the district's elementary schools met strong resistance from some board members and parents. But after "months and months of workshops and debate," the eighth-largest district in the U.S. by number of students settled on a slower approach of four phases to get safety upgrades approved, said spokesman Stephen Hegarty.

Returning students found 20 new armed officers in the elementary schools in the first year of a plan costing about $1 million. The school board also approved security training for employees, the hiring of a safety consultant and more measures to control school access, such as fencing and buzzers.

Meanwhile, all 16 schools in the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, public school district have been enclosed in security fencing and each school limits visitors to a single entry point, officials said. This September, for the first time, two police officers will patrol elementary schools, at a cost of roughly $68,000 from the district's state funding.