Mass. company makes glass to help keep schools safer

Surveillance cameras, key card readers and panic buttons have been historically common in banks, but now they’re popular in schools too.

Recently, FOX25 learned of a groundbreaking new product made by a Massachusetts company.

It started with shattered glass and ended in shattered lives

The doors at Sandy Hook Elementary were locked – but that didn’t stop Adam Lanza.

The deranged loner shot his way in to the school through a window and within a few minutes had killed 20 children.

“Glass is the weakest link in the chain that protects our children,” Christopher Kapiloff, the CEO of School Guard Glass, said.

Kapiloff’s business is bullet resistant and blast proof glass, his clients include the U.S. military and the FBI, but the massacre at Sandy Hook is what lead him from national security to school security.

“I have a daughter who was in a first grade classroom here in Massachusetts on the day of the Sandy Hook shooting and I knew if the same person came to my elementary school with the same weapon the result would have been the same,” he said.

Kapiloff, and his partners are the inventors of School Guard Glass, unlike other types of bullet and blast resistant materials, these panels are only 1/4 inch thick and fit in standard window and door frames.

School Guard provided FOX25 with video of one door they tested with shots from an assault rifle and FOX25 cameras were rolling as the same door was attacked again at their headquarters in Adams BY School Guard’s president Foster Goodrich with an aluminum bat

Strike after strike after strike the door cracked but remained intact.

The company says similar demonstrations have produced similar results hundreds of times.

In an independent, third party test the glass was shot, kicked, hit with a hammer, a bat, a 2×4 and 20 bricks  it held up for more than six minutes.

“The folks on the inside have time to react based on their own plans,” Goodrich said.

The company showed FOX25 a product sold by one its competitors, an adhesive film marketed to schools as an intruder deterrent.

Foster’s 13-year-old son took a crack at a door that had the film applied to it. It cracked after two swings of the bat.

Richard Avery is the Director of Northeast Operations for Securitas, the largest private security consulting firm in the country. He said that while installing the glass isn’t a cure-all, it does make the schools a lot safer.

“It could be an individual that is trying to get in. It could be an individual that is going to crash their way in.

It could be an individual that hides in there. So there are so many different scenarios that you could go through that to be able to say if you install this type of product you’re gonna be 100 percent safe. It’s simply not the way that it would be,” he said.

Twelve Massachusetts schools have already installed School Guard glass.

Kapiloff won’t name names, but says he has school clients in Worcester County, Boston, and the North Shore

He expects school guard glass to be in 450 schools across the U.S., including Sandy Hook, by 2016

“We have to look at the reality of the world we live in and the reality is these things do happen and we need to be prepared,” he said.

School guard glass markets itself as an affordable school security solution; they say it costs about $1,100 to have the glass installed in a door.