Gone are the days when teachers and students would huddle in a dark corner of a locked classroom if an armed person were to enter a school building.
A team of 50 people from the schools and community attended ALICE training on Aug. 2 and 3 so that they can train others, including students, later this fall.
ALICE stands for “alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate.”
Representatives from Centerstone, the Brown County Sheriff’s Department and the Nashville Police Department, Prosecutor Ted Adams and Brown County Emergency Management Director Susan Armstrong were some of the non-school attendees. The would be some of the people involved if a crisis were to happen in Brown County, said Superintendent Laura Hammack.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Previous lockdown and shooter preparations are inadequate compared to ALICE, said trainer Joe Hendry. ALICE is what schools and other groups should be using instead.
To illustrate his point, he played a five-minute audio recording from a librarian at the Columbine High School shooting in 1999.
“There were doors that would have allowed these kids to leave, and the kids wanted to leave. The teacher, because she was trained, was screaming, ‘Get down, get down!’ (The students) were trying to get out. But she was just deploying exactly what she had been trained with,” Hammack said. “If I had been that teacher in that situation, that’s exactly what I had been doing as well.”
Participants were put through five different scenarios with “guns” that launched foam balls, such as a shooter being in a classroom or in the hallways during passing periods. They had to decide what their best option would be: run or take cover.
“The best option, if you can access it, always is evacuation,” Hammack said. “… What we’ve been teaching for 25 years is to stay put. It gives me goosebumps just to even say it.”
In a traditional lockdown, students are instructed by their teacher to turn the lights off, lock the door and move to a corner of the classroom away from the door and windows. The training group did that in one shooter scenario.
“That was to show us how when you’re huddled in the corner, how you have no power. It’s very real,” Hammack said.
In another drill, Hammack said she didn’t see the shooter, but she did see people running. She opted to join them.
Others who were near the shooter went into a nearby classroom to do a lockdown. Others were shot because they were next to the shooter.
“What they teach you is, if people are running, you run with the crowd. I never did see the shooter, but I just ran with the crowd. I was safe and out in the backyard at the high school,” Hammack said.
Participants also learned other ALICE responses, such as a barricaded lockdown, which students and staff could do if they can’t get evacuate.
“Several different scenarios of active shooters, even at Columbine, when they would get to a door and it was locked and they couldn’t force their way in, they just went on to the next room,” Hammack said. “We had to actually move filing cabinets and move desks so we could practice that.”
If a shooter breaches a barricade and enters the classroom, participants learned how to counterattack. That interrupts a shooter’s decision cycle, their stance, their lining up of their target, Hammack said.
Participants also were taught the swarm technique, which is when a large group of people try and take down the shooter.
“There were moments that my heart rate was elevated. I was anxious. It was so real, but it was so powerful,” Hammack said.
A bond the school corporation recently took out covered the $20,000 price tag to become an ALICE-trained school district.
“It’s worth every penny and more. It’s such an investment in the health and wellness of our staff and our students,” Hammack said.
Empowering decisions
On May 25, a Noblesville West Middle School student entered a science classroom with two handguns and began shooting. Teacher Jason Seaman and a 13-year-old girl were wounded, but no fatalities were reported.
Noblesville West Middle School was an ALICE-trained school building. Seaman had participated in ALICE training, even acting as “the shooter” in some of the scenarios, Hammack said.
Seaman used the counterattack method when a real shooter entered his classroom. He grabbed a basketball and threw it against the shooter’s head; then, he was able to tackle the shooter.
“I think the biggest point is that teachers can make the decision,” said Helmsburg Elementary School Principal Kelli Bruner. “… It has always been, ‘You don’t leave, you sit there, be quiet,’ sometimes just waiting like a sitting duck. Now it’s, ‘You can evacuate, counter attack, you can have more help.’”
Brown County High School Principal Matt Stark was teaching in Brown County when the shooting at Columbine happened.
“Columbine High School professionally changed everything, because then it became, ‘What am I going to do as a teacher to protect my kids? What am I going to do to make sure things like that don’t happen here?’” he said.
Stark received ALICE training while serving as principal at Urbana High School in 2013.
He likened ALICE training to teaching children fire drills. Knowing what to do in case of emergency will help students even if they aren’t in school and there’s a threat someplace else, he said.
“If you went in this district right now and asked a kindergartner or a senior in high school or anyone in between, ‘What are they supposed to do in a fire drill?’ they are all going to know. Unfortunately, because of the nature of our society today, we need to get to that point from a school safety standpoint of, ‘If this happens, what are your options?’” he said.
When thinking about preventing school violence, it’s also important to focus on helping students and people in the community with mental health issues, Stark said.
“People deal with a lot of hard stuff, and we need to continue to be aware of each other and care about each other,” he said.
“It doesn’t mean we’re going to prevent all of this stuff, but it does mean if we’re vigilant, we’re paying attention to each other and we’re caring about each other, maybe we intercept when people are in pretty hard conditions.”
A better way
School principals, members of the transportation and food service departments, school office staff and some teachers were some of the 50 people who attended the training earlier this month.
“Interestingly, several actual events that have taken place have taken place in cafeterias. It’s very important your cafeteria staff have an awareness of how to respond in an event,” Hammack said.
Transportation staff would help reunify students with their parents from “rally points,” or places students will be taught to run if a shooting were to happen in their school. School staff are working now to identify what those rally and reunification points would be, Hammack said.
Brown County High School teacher Kirk Wrightsman called ALICE training an “eye-opening experience.” He’s worked in three other high schools where the lockdown method was standard.
What stood out for him in the trainer’s presentation was how fatalities in other school shootings could have been minimized if people weren’t sitting and waiting for help in classrooms.
“Would there still have been some fatalities? Probably. But I think they could have been minimized because I think in a lot of situations, people were just sitting and waiting for help, and it never came, and it was too late at that point,” he said.
During the shooting at Virginia Tech, fewer fatalities were reported in classrooms that been barricaded and countered against the shooter, he said. “That kind of speaks to what this program is talking about,” he said.
“I never would have dreamed that we would be training for something like this. It’s very sad,” Bruner said. “(But) the whole purpose is to save lives, and we want to protect our kids.”
“There are actually several schools that meet the exact kind of demographics that we have here, so we just have to be prepared for that,” Wrightsman said.
Building relationships is another way to be prepared, Stark said.
“The kids are our biggest safety measure because they know what’s going on,” he said. “It’s better to say something, it’s better to check things out and it not be real than to (say after the fact), ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t believe he talked about this (before).’ Be vigilant. … When people are talking about hurting other people, or doing harm to one individual or a group of individuals or a facility, we need to pay attention to that. That is still the greatest way to go after this.”
Wrightsman said he’s glad the school corporation has made this training a priority.
“As teachers, we do feel a little anxious about these things when we read it in the news, and it’s good to know that we have a corporation that’s on board with making sure we’re prepared as we can be,” he said.
“You’re a protector of your students, absolutely. When they are with you, they’re yours, and I am going to protect them.”
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Earlier this month, a group of 50 people from the community and Brown County Schools participated in ALICE training at Brown County High School.
After the two-day training, Superintendent Laura Hammack said she had never felt such a high level of confidence about all the resources available in case of an active threat. Now, the 50 people who were trained have a responsibility to share what they learned with the 300 staff and 1,800 students in the district, she said.
On Aug. 15, Hammack hosted a district-wide meeting for staff who did not attend the training. This was the first step in training other school staff.
She expects teachers and staff to take part in active-shooter scenarios by mid-fall. “We’re going to buy safety gear, the Airsoft guns; we’re going to do it right,” she said.
On Aug. 23, Hammack will host a community conversation focusing on school security, including what ALICE is about, which would be the first step in training parents. Then, principals will work on scheduling parent meetings in school buildings, with the content of those meetings varying based on students’ age.
Teachers will be teaching students what to do.
Helmsburg Elementary School Principal Kelli Bruner said the district has ordered the children’s book, “I’m Not Scared, I’m Prepared,” to help talk with elementary school students.
“We’ll make sure we’re all on the same page and do the best job we can to not scare them, but have them prepared,” she said. “When we do start discussions with them, hopefully that (book) is a softer way of talking to them about it.”
As part of the district’s ALICE certification, ALICE leaders will return to do a threat assessment at each school and suggest security improvements, Hammack said.
ALICE stands for “alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate.”
In years past, teachers have been instructed to put students in a lockdown — turning off lights, locking doors and hiding in the classroom — but Hammack said that response was initially deployed as a strategy to respond to drive-by shootings in Los Angeles. “The strategy was never intended for active shooter events, like something that comes from the inside,” she said.
Hammack said if anyone is not comfortable participating in ALICE training, they will not be made to do so.
“There will be students who want nothing to do with counter(attacking). That’s OK. There will be teachers that want nothing to do with counter and that’s OK,” she said.
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Superintendent Laura Hammack will host a community conversation about school security on Thursday, Aug. 23 in the Goldberg Room at Brown County High School.
The meeting begins at 6 p.m. and is expected to last for 45 minutes. Questions will be answered at the end, with the meeting to be dismissed by 7:30 p.m.
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