When it comes to busy passing periods, students have to tackle between backpacks bouncing against each other, crossing campus from point A to point B, and the door. 

To be clear, the door is one door. In fact, the issue with this door is that it’s ONE door. I find it a waste of time to even describe what door I’m referring to, because chances are most students already know without any other context. But to keep everything on the same page, this door is the door in the east side of the school, near Mr. Tatum’s room. When you go up the staircase, and get a strong whiff of school air, packed and smelling like sardines next to your peers who, if this was four years ago, the CDC would have to get involved from the lack of social distancing. You get the full experience of wishing you were anywhere else, including but not limited to: the DMV, the dentist, a Best Buy on Black Friday in 2008. 

Then you think it’s over. You see the hall light cracking through the constant flow of students, like you went on a pilgrimage to the holy lands that just so happened to be your third period class. You walk up to the petite doorway that is so small, and then the floodgate opens again. I’m talking Noah’s Ark level of flood, kids are spilling out left and right and you have no choice but to be squished against the wall as people who only care about getting to their next period pile out. 

Besides the genuinely uncomfortable experience of getting upstairs using this door, a serious question about school safety comes into question.  

There are severe risks posed by having the inability to get out, especially when large numbers of people are going through this door. Crowd crushing occurs when a moving crowd is funneled through a smaller space and reaches a point where movement no longer occurs. Doors in particular act as a major issue when it comes to crowd crushing, even when it’s a door leading to the outside. People can be easily stacked and packed into door frames, especially when there’s an emergency. Given that this door leads to stairs and one of the outside exits, if an emergency were to happen on the east end of the building, there could be potential risk of crowd crushing here compared to the other doors on campus with double-framed doors. And historically, there have been issues with single-framed doors when it comes to safety, so our nuisance of a stairway door might pose risk to students in the case of an emergency. 

Ultimately, there’s no easier solution than, well, tear it down. Especially with the school increasing in enrollment as more people move into this town, there’s going to be a point where the school can’t occupy the amount of people in the halls. Just the change of making these doors double-framed could improve people’s ability to get around faster and prevent increased danger during a disaster. Despite any cost, a new door installation could be done over the summer to leave the future classes of our school happy and healthy.