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Keegan Hoelscher was at an assembly in the auditorium of East High School two years ago when a fellow student shot and injured two deans, a tragic incident that reignited a debate about school safety in Denver and led to big changes, including the reintroduction of school police.
But Hoelscher doesn’t necessarily think East High is unsafe. And he definitely doesn’t think that a proposal to install a secure vestibule will make the school safer. The proposal calls for building an enclosed entryway with a desk and a transaction window where visitors — and possibly some students who’ve been flagged as a safety risk — could be screened.
“It’s mainly just security theater,” said Hoelscher, a junior at the school.
The plan has sparked significant pushback from students, staff, and alumni at the city’s largest and most storied high school. They question the effectiveness of a secure vestibule and balk at its $800,000 price tag. Some are also concerned that the installation will do irreversible damage to East High’s “great hall,” the nickname for the expansive foyer whose walls are lined with gray marble that dates back to the school’s construction in 1925.
“It’ll deface the building,” said Marcia Goldstein, a 1969 graduate who helped found the school’s alumni association and nominated East to become a historic Denver landmark in 1991, around the time her daughters were students there. “It will just be a disaster. It’s okay if it’s a disaster if it serves a good purpose, but it’s not going to serve the purpose that is intended.”
Construction was supposed to start this week, when Denver Public Schools is on spring break, with the bulk of the installation occurring over the summer. But opposition to the project grew so loud that the district is now putting it on hold.
“We understand that the community wishes to provide additional feedback,” said Greg Cazzell, chief of the district’s climate and safety department. “And we’re going to give them an opportunity to hear from them and show them the plans and give more understanding of what the intent of the secure vestibule is and what it looks like.”
As for whether it’s possible that plans for the secure vestibule will be scrapped altogether, Cazzell said, “I would not say that.”
Secure vestibules aren’t controversial at other schools
Secure vestibules are a common safety feature in newer school buildings, and many school districts nationwide are retrofitting older buildings with them as well, school safety experts said. While the vestibules may be best practice, experts acknowledged they’re not a cure-all.
“Should every school have a secure vestibule? Yes,” said Ben Crum, a security specialist who serves on the advisory council for an organization called the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools. But, Crum said, “that’s not going to prevent everything.”
Secure vestibules are most effective at stopping outsiders — visitors, strangers, parents in the midst of child custody disputes — from coming into schools without being screened, experts said. They are less effective at stopping students and staff who are supposed to be there. But experts said vestibules can delay even a student or staff member from doing harm.
“In the security world, we’re trying to buy time to respond to the threat,” Crum said.
Some Denver school buildings already have secure vestibules, though district officials did not provide a number. Seventeen more schools are set to get them over the next few years, funded by about $10 million from a $975 million bond measure passed by Denver voters in November.
East High is not among the 17 schools. East’s secure vestibule would be funded by a different pot of money: extra dollars, known as bond premium, from an earlier bond measure approved by Denver voters in 2020. Secure vestibules weren’t initially part of the 2020 bond. But both the district’s bond oversight committee and the Denver school board agreed in early 2024 to spend bond premium dollars on a secure vestibule at East High.
Vernon Jones, who serves on the bond oversight committee, said gun violence in and around East High was “front of mind” when the committee made that decision.
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Several shootings had occurred the previous school year. In September 2022, a student was shot and injured outside a recreation center next to the school. In February 2023, another student was shot and killed while sitting in his car outside the school. And a month later, yet another student shot and injured two deans inside the school and later took his own life.
The shootings led to student protests, the formation of a parent advocacy group, calls for the school board to resign, the reintroduction of school police, and the development of a long-term safety plan for the entire district.
“We have heard a lot … during my time on the board — and prior to that — about ensuring greater physical safety in our schools,” said Denver school board member Scott Esserman, who was elected in 2021 and also serves on the bond oversight committee. But, he said, he’s heard no pushback on secure vestibules at any other schools that are set to get one.
“There are layers to safety and security, and this is one of those,” Esserman said of secure vestibules. “And it’s going to look different at different buildings.”
Denver’s Thomas Jefferson High School has had a secure vestibule for the past five years. Principal Mike Christoff said the idea came from the school community.
“It felt like we could do better,” Christoff said. “It’s unfortunately the reality of our society.”
The secure vestibule at Thomas Jefferson looks like a long and skinny foyer just inside the front doors. A staff member sits behind a glass bank teller-style window, monitoring who goes in and out. Building a secure vestibule onto the utilitarian 1960s-era school building was expensive but not complicated, Christoff said, and it hasn’t been controversial.
But everyone agrees that East — with its historic building, famous alumni, and more than its fair share of children of the city’s powerbrokers — is different, both logistically and politically.
“There’s no more important building in Denver for me than East High School,” said James Mejia, a former school board member and one-time mayoral candidate who has held a string of high-profile jobs in the city and is now chief strategy officer at Metropolitan State University. Mejia graduated from East in 1985 and one of his daughters is currently a sophomore.
He opposes the vestibule, both because he doubts its effectiveness and because the East High community wasn’t asked what they think.
“This is a school that takes community input and stakeholder input more seriously than any other place I’ve been associated with,” Mejia said. “Not having a process like that at East High School is falling well short of expectations and good planning.”
‘It’s the people that make us feel safe’
Abigail Forsberg first heard about the secure vestibule during a student council meeting last school year. She thought it was a bad idea, but it seemed like a far-off proposal. Then, two months ago, she heard that “it was almost 100%” going to happen.
Forsberg, a sophomore, sprung into action. She and other student council members began circulating a petition asking the district to stop the vestibule. They passed it around in their classes, posted about it on Instagram, and walked up and down the City Park Esplanade in front of East, asking parents idling in their cars at school pickup time to sign it. Forsberg estimates they already have collected close to 1,000 signatures.
Forsberg also signed up for public comment at a Denver school board meeting this month, where she called the proposed secure vestibule an “illusion of safety.”
East has more than a dozen other entrances, Forsberg and others said. While locked from the outside, the doors are often propped open by students who let their friends in or hold the door for strangers walking behind them. When Forsberg is outside at soccer practice, she said she sees ground-floor windows big enough to jump through hanging wide open.
East also already has cameras and a buzzer at the front doors, as well as a manned security desk that runs visitors’ driver’s licenses through a digital system to check for red flags. It has several unarmed campus security officers and two armed city police officers stationed in the building.
“I don’t think it’s the things that we build that make us feel safe,” Forsberg said. “It’s the people that make us feel safe.”
A secure vestibule, she said, is “not going to make anyone feel safer. It’s going to make it look like the district tried.”
It could also alter a space that many students and alumni hold dear. The wide-open foyer has served as a meeting spot for generations of students, alumni said. The school choir hosts performances there, and it’s the site of a winter dance known as the Snow Ball. Student clubs put on a yearly fashion show featuring outfits made of recyclable materials and use the foyer as a runway, students said.
“It’s lazy on behalf of the district to just do a cookie-cutter approach, and for every school in every neighborhood to do a vestibule, because that’s the easiest thing to do,” said Sheila MacDonald, a 1983 East graduate. MacDonald said she heard about the vestibule because she was at the school making arrangements for an alumni association scholarship event when district staff came in and began talking to each other about which walls to “blow out.”
District officials now insist no walls will be blown out — not now, and maybe not ever if they can install the secure vestibule in a way that doesn’t damage the historic marble. A community meeting about the plan was scheduled for mid-March but then canceled when school board members couldn’t make it. Then, last week, district Superintendent Alex Marrero sent a letter to East families and staff saying that the project would be put “on hold for now.”
“Doing so will allow valuable time to better engage with your community, provide for the refinement of the school’s comprehensive safety strategy, all with the goal of project implementation in the summer of 2026 as part of our comprehensive plan,” Marrero wrote.
The district is working to reschedule the community meeting, officials said.
When she heard of the project’s postponement, Forsberg was in a meeting with Denver school board President Carrie Olson and fellow student council members.
“We’re really glad that we got enough community members to be invested in it and postpone it,” Forsberg said. “We have more time to tell the district that East doesn’t want this.”
Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.
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