WASHINGTON -- At Park Hill High School in Kansas City, Mo., some of the most heightened security measures in the area didn’t prevent a student from bringing a .22-caliber handgun to school last month.

The school recently added more security cameras, guards and locks on all external doors. The Park Hill School District already had required middle and high school students to wear identification badges around their necks for the past few years.

They’re not just an adornment. In some of the middle schools, students with a temporary badge are escorted from class to class; in the high schools, they take their lunch in detention.

Yet on Jan. 31, a sophomore was arrested at the end of the school day after another student tipped off administrators that he’d been carrying a loaded weapon.

“I was surprised that the individual had the firearm all day, but I wasn’t surprised the other individual turned him in,” said Paxton DiBlasi, a Park Hill senior.

Schools around the country have implemented an array of security measures in the wake of recent gun-related violence on campus, including the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December that left 20 children and six educators dead.

Many local school systems are finding that it falls on their shoulders to find out what meets the needs of their communities. They have learned that even the most advanced technology is no replacement for having trained and prepared students and staff.

“When you walk into these schools, you’re finding crisis teams have not actually been formalized and have not been meeting on a regular basis, school crisis plans have not been updated for a number of years, and all of a sudden after Sandy Hook, people are scrambling,” said Ken Trump, a national school security consultant.

The approaches can vary, from hiring full-time armed guards to teaching students to throw iPads at an attacker. That technique is one part of a security preparation program in use at some schools around the country, known as ALICE, an acronym for “alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate.”

Congress intends to weigh in, too. The House Education and the Workforce Committee will hold a hearing later this month on how schools prepare for threats of violence.

The sprawling Oak Park Unified School District northwest of Los Angeles took out an estimate on installing fences around every school before deciding that the nearly $2 million project was not the way to go.

Instead, Superintendent Tony Knight will make a series of recommendations to the school board this month. He said these will include outfitting custodians and other personnel in neon yellow vests, painting the schools’ identification numbers on their roofs, and enticing the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department to make more frequent stops at the schools by providing office space and free lunches.

“It’s the concept of realizing we can’t do everything, but doing everything that we can,” said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center. “Even with the best of strategies, there’s not a foolproof formula that will prevent any future shooting of this nature from taking place. But we can do some reasonable things that reflect appropriate judgments.”

For example, many schools have installed locks and redesigned their front offices to enhance security on a budget. The number of students ages 12-18 who reported that their schools locked their entrance doors swelled from 38 percent to 64 percent between 1999 and 2009, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.