Noblesville parents wanted more security. Then a school shooting happened to them.

From the corner of a darkened classroom, hiding behind a hastily made barricade of desks and chairs, an adult in Noblesville West Middle School mouthed, "It's going to be OK," to the more than 20 terrified faces surrounding her.

The girl closest to her had silent tears streaming down her face.

They heard gunshots. A pause. More gunshots.

The adult, who spoke to IndyStar under the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said a calmness came over her minutes earlier, when she heard over the intercom, “This is not a drill. There is a shooter in the seventh-grade hallway."

The school practiced this before. She checked to make sure the door was closed, pulled the blinds, turned off the lights.

For some panicked parents flooding to the building, the harrowing 25-minute wait that followed brought into sharp focus the security concerns they'd brought up before — classroom windows and doors that aren’t bulletproof, no metal detectors, the multiple entryways used in the mornings.

What once seemed like small, common issues now felt like the difference between life and death.

“If you pray, please pray now,” she told the students.

Parents meet after Parkland school shooting

As the legal process continues, parents still only know small pieces of what happened on May 25.

They know a seventh-grader left his classroom and returned with two handguns, a .22 and a .45. They know a teacher, Jason Seaman, intervened to stop the shooter. They know 13-year-old Ella Whistler was shot seven times, according to her family, but is now recovering.

They also know it could have been much worse. And that has some parents and safety advocates asking a scary, “what if?”

What if it hadn’t happened in the classroom of a 6-foot-something former college football player?

Lisa Duell’s sunny, yellow kitchen became the headquarters of a grassroots parent effort to harden Noblesville’s schools months ago. They came together in the wake of the Parkland school shooting, shaken by how similar that community seemed.

The group researched different options, talked to national experts, met with the superintendent and presented their findings to the school board in March. They wanted the extensive security system used in Southwestern High School in Shelby County.

The 'Safest School in America'

Dubbed the “safest school in America,” the system is designed to thwart an active shooter using cameras with a direct feed to the county sheriff's office, panic buttons for teachers and smoke cannons in hallways.

At the time, Duell told board members that parents feel the system follows all of the Department of Homeland Security's guidelines for school safety.

Published in 2017, the list includes locked exterior doors, sensors or detectors, strobes, horns and a protected space where "occupants can retreat."

The district held a school safety meeting on March 18. The district didn't release specific details, but said they ran drills regularly and local police were working to get officers in every building. District spokeswoman Marnie Cooke said the district's safety team had already identified some potential "enhancements."

Then the unexpected happened.

Students cowered in dark classrooms; parents waited in fear

Duell was on her way to the nail salon for a quick manicure before work on May 25 when a police car flew by in the opposite direction. It was unusual, and she remembers hoping everyone was OK wherever that officer was headed.

Then her phone rang, and she found herself following the officer as fast as she could.

Duell said her stomach flipped every time her phone buzzed. She kept thinking it was her daughter, and every time it wasn’t her worry deepened. She later learned her daughter was busy hiding in a darkened classroom.

She had armed herself with an iPad and a sharpened pencil.

Duell finally got the message she was waiting for from an unknown number. A boy in her daughter’s class was letting people borrow his phone to text their parents.

"I clutch my phone like a drowning woman clutches a life preserver and collapse to my knees," she later wrote on Facebook. "I feel an overwhelming love for this boy that I don’t know and I can never, ever repay him for his simple act of kindness."

Finally, Duell could breathe. But she didn't stop crying. She cried for the parents who wouldn't get that text. She still tears up for the family across the street, and the one a few doors down, who also are coping with this. And again for Ella Whister's family, who lives in the same neighborhood.

"It's too much," she said.

Noblesville school district to hold public safety forum

For now, district leaders are pausing and re-evaluating.

The district sent an email to parents nearly a week after the shooting saying administrators had received a "tremendous outpouring" from parents, community members and national groups wanting to launch safety fundraisers, join safety groups and meet with leadership.

The statement said school leaders were "in the process of investigating last week's incident," but that administrators, teachers and students followed safety procedures.

A public safety forum will be scheduled over the summer, it said. More information will come soon, Cooke said.

Duell keeps repeating that she's thankful for teachers and first responders who kept the scary situation from becoming a mass tragedy. But that doesn't mean everything went perfectly, or that there isn't room for improvement.

"They did an incredible job with the tools that they had," she said. "But what if the outcome had been different? They deserve to be equipped with the right tools."

Motion detectors, emergency key fobs among potential improvements

The adult who spoke to IndyStar about her experience during the shooting clearly remembers the voice on the intercom saying the shooter was in the seventh-grade hallway, but not specifying if it was upstairs, downstairs or in a science room.

Without knowing all the details of what happened inside the school that day, Duell argues if each teacher had an emergency key fob, or if there were motion detectors in the hallways like in Shelbyville, school leaders and law enforcement would have known exactly where the shooter was sooner.

More specificity, she said, could have made a difference in how kids were evacuated.

In response to the call for the more extreme security system, Cooke repeated a statement the district has said many times over the past three months.

"We appreciate input from our parents," she said. "But when we make decisions we are going to make them with school safety experts and law enforcement partners."

The A.L.I.C.E. active shooter response training program

The district trains employees and students through a program called A.L.I.C.E., which recommends a few responses to an active shooter. In a dire situation, if lockdown or evacuation aren't possible, it instructs people to kick, bite, tackle or throw things at the shooter.

Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, said the program has some benefits, such as teaching students it's better to do something than nothing. But assuming it's the only solution, he said, could be dangerous.

"Some people will take to the skillset and the training of ALICE better than others," he said. "But those … that really tend to shut down more when placed under greater stress, it’s not going to be as effective."

Cooke referred to the training as "one tool in our toolbox," but credits it as "a key part of why we did not have a worse outcome on May 25."

Eells said he wished more communities and parents would follow Noblesville's lead and start discussions about safety.

"Too often people get too caught up in looking for a single solution," he said. "And then the lack of progress becomes normalcy, and then we're back to the same apathy."

Duell is calling on administrators and parents to get together to find multiple ways to strengthen school safety. The first change on her list are the temporary portable classrooms used for overflow classes.

Noblesville, like other districts in the area, have them located outside of some elementary school buildings. Because they can't be hardened, Duell wants them removed by Aug. 1. She argues if the district can find room to hold for-profit preschool classes inside, they should find room for all K-12 students.

"The bare minimum expectation is that the school can provide a classroom for our elementary school children that is located within a brick-and-mortar school structure," she said.

Cooke said the district would be evaluating its use of the mobile classrooms.

Helping her daughter cope with the shooting's aftermath

Sitting next to Duell's laptop on the kitchen table is a letter from Rep. Susan Brook's office. She still hasn't gotten around to that manicure, and her nails click against her phone as she texts different experts and parents without pause.

She's planning to apply for the open school board seat and is telling anyone who will listen to be at the next school board meeting at 7 p.m. June 12.

But she's still a mom. And she's still trying to help her daughter cope with what they experienced. Behind her on the wall is a family calendar with pictures of her smiling kids.

Duell cringes every time she says "before the shooting" or "after the shooting," mumbling to herself, "There's that phrase again." She's not afraid, she said, just motivated.

"I guess we can no longer say, 'It can't happen here,'" Duell said. "I guess the best we can say now is, 'This won't happen again.'"

Follow Emma Kate Fittes on Twitter @IndyEmmaKate

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