Utah company designs shelter to protect students
Mar 23, 2018, 7:17 AM | Updated: 11:11 pm
In search of safer schools for our children, we’re looking for innovative ideas — some that may even challenge traditional thinking, anything to protect the lives of our most important resource.
One of those ideas was born right here in Utah.
Shelter-In-Place makes weatherproof and bulletproof shelters that can fit inside a classroom. Some schools are already using them in Oklahoma.
Jim Haslem is the CEO, and he’s from southern Utah. He says after watching the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook and severe weather threaten schools in the South and Midwest, he had to do something.
“I think it’s just a real indicator and a sense of the hopelessness that people feel,” he says. “‘Geez, there’s got to be something.’ And then they see our little video of the shelter actually being in the classroom, that ‘oh my gosh, there is a reasonable solution.’ It’s just a dual purpose, a functional part of a classroom, that the kids can go in everyday as a quiet room, reading room, whatever. And it also doubles in the case of a crisis, it doubles as a shelter, a safe room.”
A Facebook video of the shelter has more than 50 million views.
His Facebook page has more than 100,000 followers. He is currently in Florida at the request of school districts and families there to show them his product as a potential way to save lives.
