The Lake Washington School District installed more than 300 new locks in schools on the Plateau this summer.

Districtwide, support services staff installed more than 1,100 locks at 40 schools.

The new locking mechanisms allow teachers to lock classroom doors from the inside; previously, during a lockdown, teachers had to exit their classrooms to lock them.

“None of this was on our radar before Columbine,” Eastlake High School Associate Principal Todd Apple said. “It’s a part of our lives now.”

Before the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, school officials  never had to think about safety the way they do now.

It was common place to have many exterior doors because there wasn’t a “need to think about access to our campus or to our school,” Apple said.

Today, lockdown drills on campuses are common.

Eastlake High practices lockdown drills, including fire and earthquake drills, once a month.

“We all have to think about the what-ifs,” Apple said.

Apple previously worked seven years as a high school principal in Whatcom County in northeast Washington. He is one of three associate principals at Eastlake.

At Eastlake, 107 locks were replaced. In total, district staff replaced 311 locks in Lake Washington schools on the Plateau, according to the Forrest Miller, director of support services for the district.

Part of the capital projects levy voters approved in the February 2014 special election paid for the installment of the locks.

Replacing the locks is part of the district’s ongoing efforts to assess its facilities and safety planning, Apple said.

The goal is to remain up-to-date with the latest safety practices.

For teachers, the new locks are “absolutely” a step in the right direction, said Diane Fabish, a resource teacher at Eastlake.

“If we have to go out into the hall and fiddle around, it’s really cumbersome,” she said.

In her room, Fabish leaves the locked door propped open. In the case of an emergency, all she has to do is close it.

Fabish has worked at Eastlake for 13 years. Prior to that she worked at Lake Washington High School for 12 years and before that in California for 13 years.

In all her time at Eastlake, there’s only been on serious lockdown, which turned out to be a false alarm.

Still, “when that comes over the intercom and it’s not a drill, that’s disconcerting,” she said. “I’m glad we practice and that we do the drills.”

There have already been two drills at Eastlake since school began Sept. 1.

The first drill, Apple said, began during a lunch period, but even outside of class everyone knew what to do, or at the very least, listened to the teachers and faculty guiding them to where they needed to go.

“The school was smooth,” he said.

The most recent drill was the day after the Roseburg, Oregon, mass shooting at Umpqua Community College last week.

Incidents like these, Fabish said, generate discussion because it is on the minds of students.

“It’s become an unfortunate fact of life,” she said.

One that she said she doesn’t dwell on.

“It’s pretty clear on what to do in an emergency,” she said. “It’s taken very seriously. … We expect the kids to take it seriously and they do. They do.”

The second phase of district upgrades will include interior window treatments to prevent someone from seeing inside the classroom. This is currently in the planning phase.

The last phase of the safety upgrades will be to restrict access to the campus by installing more card readers.