Per this post, a loyal reader and educator from NYC writes that:
The problem is that for even the best principals and school leaders, the problems posed by this are almost impossible to figure out how to handle. It is one thing to have plans in place for how schools would deal with an attack on some other target in the city; that has been done, and the NYC schools really did magnificently on 9/11, without plans in place. But it is really close to impossible, I think, to figure out how a school could do anything meaningful to protect its students in the face of something like the takeover of the Russian school short of making it an armed camp. And if one school were attacked, I think that other schools would be overwhelmed by frantic parents determined to take their children home as quickly as possible. In NYC, we are talking about hundreds and hundreds of schools, so you can’t even conceive of any sort of police presence which would be more than an early warning; you would have to move in National Guard troops by the thousands – and Bush has all of them committed to Iraq. This is something no one talks about, because no one really knows how to get a handle on this given the sheer numbers of schools, and the undertaking it would involve to provide any meaningful security for them.