Parent announces drive to add bullet-resistant film over windows, replace doors in Ashland School District buildings

By Morgan Rothborne, Rogue Valley Times

Schools are responsible for the lives of children, and they are negligent in not protecting them better from active shooters, Ashland parent Alex Sol argued at a community meeting Thursday night in Ashland to announce his new nonprofit organization but, more important, his plan for increased school safety.

Sol is a former actor, a self-described survivor of two public shootings, and a father of two — Sky, 12, and Symphony, 8 — who with his wife, Natalie Sol, is working to make Safe Zone Solutions a legally recognized 501(c)(3) organization.

But Sol doesn’t want to wait for the technical details. He wants a solution to protect his children now. He and his wife organized the community meeting as the first of many, he said, as a way to try to gain public support in forcing the Ashland School District to install bulletproof doors and glass or bullet-resistant glass film in schools throughout the district.

Standing by a projector screen in the ballroom of the Ashland Springs Hotel Thursday night, Sol’s face was tense with emotion as he paused a video of an interview with a now-teenage survivor of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Sol pointed to the survivor on the screen, who noted at the time of the interview that in the eight years since she had survived the Dec. 14, 2012, tragedy that cost 26 lives, the pattern of frequent, high-casualty school shootings hasn’t changed.

“Eight years and nothing changed. That was a breach of our humanity there,” Sol said.

Sol explained to his audience of slightly fewer than 30 people that because a shooter only needs access to a school for a few minutes to take multiple lives, points of access must be the focus for safe schools.

“Shooters come to schools because they know they are going to find victims who are going to be trapped. They know the doors cannot hold,” he said.

Sol wants to see fortified entryways and windows as part of building codes for schools nationally, but he’s starting at home with the Ashland School District.

“There was one big fire in 1911 (the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City), workers trapped and unable to get out, and that changed everything. That’s what led to the exit signs above your heads, and the sprinklers. … Airlines all have critical redundancies. When they have one crash, they have to study it over and over. Why? So it never happens again. We don’t have the same dynamic with our children,” he said.

In his presentation, he played various video clips from school shootings and guided his audience to the understanding that the doors are the key. In the video of the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, he pointed to a failure he has noticed in many similar tragedies — American schools often have doors connecting one classroom to another. Classroom doors to hallways or between rooms often have small glass windows.

The teacher saw the shooter in the hallway, locked the door and told her class to hide. The shooter looked through the window of the locked door and saw the interconnecting door between the classrooms. The adjoining classroom was unlocked. Moving through that room, he shot through the window in the connecting door, reached through, unlocked the door and let himself in where 19 children and their teacher were trapped. Only one student survived.

“It can all take 10 seconds or less. Schools are caught completely flat-footed every time because it takes the police up to three minutes to respond. That’s three minutes for the shooter to have complete power and dominion of whatever’s in his scope,” Sol said in a phone interview Wednesday.

All his efforts started with questions that have no good answers, he said. First, his youngest daughter wanted to know how she would be safe if there was a shooting at her school.

“I went to her elementary school, and within one or two questions I realized they don’t know what to do. They have no idea,” he said.

He described himself as a man on fire. He is uninterested, he said, in the mires of the national gun debate. Political questions are separate from the responsibility of adults to protect children. Sol has found a door that meets his expectations from New York company Remo Security, a company specializing in ultra-secure doors. But, he said, he doesn’t care what company supplies the doors, as long as they stop bullets. 

Remo’s doors cost between $3,500 and $4,000, he said. The bullet-resistant film he proposes installing over windows and other glass is projected to delay a shooter’s entry by five to nine minutes, enough time for law enforcement to arrive.

Classrooms should be as safe as students and teachers expect them to be, Sol said. If they could evacuate to their classrooms, it could also prevent situations like in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting where students attempted to evacuate the building en masse and instead found themselves crammed into narrow hallways.

Sol said he has met with Ashland School District Superintendent Samuel Bogdanove twice. Denise Krause, an elected member of the Rogue Valley Transportation District Board and previous Jackson County commissioner candidate, attended these meetings with him in support of his proposal. Sol has also exchanged numerous emails with Bogdanove, Ashland School Board members and state Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland.

No one, he said, can satisfactorily answer his question: “What is being done to protect my daughter?”

He expressed frustration that elementary schools in Ashland have invested in aesthetic beauty and active shooter drills, but exterior doors are left unlocked. It is antithetical to true safety, he said, to ask his daughter to practice hiding but leave the door to her school unlocked and unfortified.

In the audience Thursday night, 12-year-old Sky Sol raised her hand to criticize the drills.

“All of us hiding in one corner, doesn’t that make us all sitting ducks?” she said.

During the question-and-answer portion of the evening, some parents in the audience asked why no one from the district was in attendance. Sol said Bogdanove, members of the Ashland School Board and Rep. Marsh were informed of the meeting. 

Marsh could not be immediately reached for comment. Bogdanove responded via email that he is out of the office until Tuesday. Newly elected Ashland School Board member Rebecca Dyson responded to a request for comment by email Friday. 

“The board turned over two seats in the recent election and will not meet as a whole until mid-August,” she wrote in an email. “Once that happens, we are planning to arrange a meeting with Mr. Sol. In the meantime, we have all been independently reviewing his proposals and speaking with district staff regarding the feasibility and benefits of what he is proposing, as well as any potential drawbacks or additional concerns.”

The district is always reassessing safety and potential improvements, she said.

Sol said he is submitting a formal complaint to the Ashland School District and asked interested community members to join him. He is also creating an email list for future actions and ways to stay involved with Safe Zone. To learn more, visit safezonesolution.net, or email [email protected].

Reach reporter Morgan Rothborne at [email protected]. This story first appeared in the Rogue Valley Times.