Published 11 March 2015
Some active shooter drills in schools now involve someone firing shots and people pretending to be shot. Many police officials and security consultants believe lessons are better learned when the real scenario can be replicated. This growing trend in active shooter response training encourages would be targets to explore other options to deal with a live shooter besides hiding and locking classroom doors. The trend toward options beyond the traditional lockdown gained traction after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, where an armed student broke into classrooms, killing thirty-seven people many of whom were trying to hide.
School districts throughout the country are reviewing protocols for responding to active shooter scenarios. At Independence, Missouri’s Pioneer Ridge Middle School, about sixty-five teachers and staff members participated in a recent training session where Police Sgt. Chris Summers roamed the school’s library holding an Airsoft pistol filled with plastic pellets, playing the part of an active shooter. “You’re shot,” Summers said, tapping the gun barrel on three teachers huddled behind a table.
Not all active shooter drills involve someone firing shots and people pretending to be shot, but many police officials and security consultants believe lessons are better learned when the real scenario can be replicated. This growing trend in active shooter response training encourages would be targets to explore other options to deal with a live shooter besides hiding and locking classroom doors.
“Things are moving in that direction,” said Paul Fennewald, director of the Center for Education Safety, a partnership of law enforcement agencies and the Missouri School Boards Association. Fighting with an armed intruder is not the first solution that comes to the mind of faculty and students. It “isn’t in the mindset of the education culture,” Fennewald said.
“But you look at where we are as a society now, you’ve got to get your mind around it. … You need options. You can’t just lay down in a fetal position and die.”
The proactive active shooter response concept goes by many names such as “Run, hide, fight,” “Escape, evade, engage,” Get out, hide out, take out,” and “Flee, fade, fight.”
According to the Kansas City Star, critics have questioned the effectiveness of these active shooter response drills, saying the lessons learned could result in more deaths than might occur in a basic lockdown, where school staff and students lock themselves in classrooms and remain quiet. Even in the training sessions, some teachers have reported physical and emotional damages.
In Farmington, Missouri, four teachers complained to the county prosecutor that active shooter drills made them uncomfortable. In Iowa, more than twenty-five school workers have filed for workers’ compensation for injuries that they claimed occurred in active shooter drills. “We have injuries related to running, to tackling, being tackled, running into door jambs, jumping off furniture,” said Jerry Loghry of EMC Insurance Companies in Des Moines, whose company insures most Iowa schools and 1,500 districts nationwide.
Toff Fuller, spokesman for the Missouri State Teachers Association, said that some teachers feel uncomfortable about their jobs after an active shooter drill. “You have teachers whose sole purpose is helping people,” yet they are being trained to confront a violent unlikely threat the way police would. “The way they (law enforcement) train people is vastly different from the way teachers do training,” said Fuller. “It’s two divergent populations colliding.”
Schools in Independence have adopted the ALICE model which standards for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, or Evacuate. The program, developed by police in Houston, Texas, after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, gives faculty and students the option to alert, run, fight or, given the situation, go into a traditional lockdown. Now administered by Ohio-based ALICE Training Institute, instructors travel the country to host two-day seminars that train school officials, law enforcement, security consultants, and private companies. “The last count I got, there are 1,700 police departments and 1,600 school districts on board,” said the institute’s founder, Greg Crane, a former Texas police officer.
The trend toward options beyond the traditional lockdown gained traction after the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, where an armed student broke into classrooms, killing thirty-seven people many of whom were trying to hide. “I believe it’s all about options,” said Alisa Pacer, emergency preparedness manager at Johnson County Community College where the protocol for active shooter scenarios is first to track the location of the intruder, notify faculty through text alerts, then do what is necessary, including barricading doors or directing students to a safe exit. “Doing nothing gets people killed,” Pacer said.
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