By: Amelia Naughten, News Editor

As someone who spends a lot of time after school for extracurriculars, I’ve always thought of the campus door policy as an inconvenience. After 6 p.m., it’s a constant onslaught of “please open the door” messages from friends, forcing me to walk out even to just hallway doors to prop them back open. If only these doors were open for a little longer, our problems would be solved. 

For many students at Mills, the door schedule feels a little over-the-top and counterintuitive at times. The school doors are on an automatic electronic locking system from 8:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. (school hours). Facilities personnel manage locking all of the non-electronic doors. The doors also alternate which sides are open, with it being very rare for both doors at a particular entrance to be open at the same time.

For Ronan Gensel (10), the door schedule feels a bit “arbitrary.” Gensel remarks, “Every day, like without fail, I see people get rejected by the door because they’ll [try to] open the one that’s locked.”

Jade Hu (12) often finds herself as one of those people locked out in the mornings when she’s late to class. Hu recounts, “When I had math in the morning, they would lock the math hall doors, so I had to take the walk of shame past the math windows to get to the back ones. Then they would lock the doors in the front, so I would have to take the walk of shame through the office.” While Hu understands the safety concerns that come with opening the school doors for longer, she feels that if the electronic system was extended to just halfway through first or second period, it would make a big difference.

Students also find conflict with the door schedule in the afternoons. As a middle college student with extracurriculars at Mills, Olive Galindo Aguilar (11) constantly struggles to find open doors during sixth and seventh period.

“Either like two experiences happen where I go to the front and they don’t let me go through. Then I have to go around, and they have to ask me a bunch of questions, and you’re just like, ‘I go to school here,’” Aguilar says.

At the same time, staff at Mills highlight a different, overarching concern: school safety. As threats of U.S. school shootings have proliferated in the past several years, it’s more important than ever to have a secure campus, and locking the doors is one way to ensure this. 

Alana Tipton is one of the Administrative Assistants at Mills and works as the Front Office Coordinator, vetting outsiders as they walk in. While she understands that for students, it “may seem like a hassle to just wait there and walk all the way around to the front door,” she encourages them to look at the bigger picture. “Especially with everything going on in the world right now…we’re just trying to keep you guys safe as our students and just trying to keep our staff safe as well, and if that means you have to walk a little bit further, then that’s what that means.”

Michael Duer, one of Mills’ Campus Safety Specialists, also commented on the safety aspect of locking the doors. However, he brought up a new consideration.  

Duer has noticed that despite Mills being a strictly closed campus, students still leave during brunch and lunch to get food or hang out in the parking lot. This is a huge liability for the school, but there’s an even bigger underlying problem: when students who leave campus wait to come back in, they’re training students in Mills to open up the door for anyone.

According to Duer, this has fostered a culture where “in the end, no one pays attention to who’s coming in.” He further noted that we may “think it’s secure, but it’s not really safe at all.”

At the core of this issue, Duer believes students need to start “investing” in Mills more, meaning taking care of the school and watching out for each other. Ideally, Duer shared that the admin would like to trust students more and have policies that reflect that trust, particularly around the bathrooms, but because of recent vaping and littering on campus that’s been occurring on top of leaving the campus during school hours, admin is left with no choice but to regulate the mess.

As of right now, I understand that it’s highly unlikely for Mills to be an open campus, and that’s not what I would feel most comfortable with as a student, either. At the same time, I also believe that the door schedule could be slightly adjusted to be open slightly longer in the mornings and afternoons to be more accommodating for late students and extracurriculars. Ultimately, while I hope that admin and students can create a relationship that reciprocates trust, this takes time, and I think opening up the doors for a little longer would be the best compromise for the present.

This article has been updated to reflect corrections made after its initial publication.