And so, it has come to this.
The key cautionary advice that parents and teachers recently heard at a school safety symposium didn’t concern locking classroom doors and hiding under desks if an armed intruder enters their children’s school. It involved active defense — such as throwing things at the shooter if the very worst happens and their emergency perimeter is breached.
We have come to a point that the newly elected sheriff is actively training people to fight back if they have to. Not actual hand-to-hand combat training, mind you. Not yet, anyway. But how far are we from that?
The what-if scenarios are much more sinister, because school safety has never felt so urgent.
And so, it has come to this: A parent is so alarmed by her child’s fear of an intruder or an armed student at her school that she organizes a small campaign that quickly draws over a thousand supporters. She and two other worried moms appear before the school board to demand that metal detectors be installed — airport style — at school entrances.
We have come to a point that moms feel compelled to contact security vendors to get specifications and pricing on equipment that would have to be booted up every single school day by professionally trained technicians who would beam X-rays at 20 kids per minute.
That idea has not been embraced by school administrators. One of the reasons is because of the bottleneck of students that would inevitably develop just outside school buildings as they awaited clearance. The worry seems to be less about possibly delaying the start of school than it is about creating a vulnerable target for a sniper.
And so, it has come to this: At that school safety symposium, held Nov. 14 at Greenfield-Central High School with a panel of seven community thought leaders on the topic, the vast majority of the questions from the disappointingly small audience was about active-shooter training in the schools. One parent said her child had reported that recent training included a suggestion that someone will need to “be a hero” if an intruder ever gets inside the school. For the record, no one who coordinates training in the schools has suggested such a thing. That we have come a point that it had to be publicly debunked, however, tells us where we are in this discussion. It’s a dark place.
Jim Bever, the former principal at Greenfield Intermediate School who is now the Greenfield-Central district’s director of student services, told the audience that preparing for the unthinkable is actually empowering for young people. We have come to a point, he said, where “our kids need to have a plan. They need to feel more than helpless. Because that helpless feeling is the worst… They know they can be part of a solution and not a helpless bystander.”
He no doubt could scarcely believe the words that were coming out of his mouth.
And so, it has come to this: John Jokantas, the director of the county’s 911 center, gave this advice during the symposium on what parents should do if a shooting occurs at their children’s school: Please don’t call 911 to find out what happened. Their frantic need for information, he said, could overwhelm the dispatchers who would be busy coordinating emergency response. Jokantas hated to say that, but we have come to the point that he and other emergency communications experts have studied emergency communications during past school shootings. One of the conclusions: Operators have been deluged by calls from panicked parents at a time when they are trying to coordinate emergency response and/or directing manhunts.
We have to think about the unthinkable, because the unthinkable can happen. It can happen here, because it has happened in other places where welcoming environments for learning have become targets for deranged people intent on doing harm. We talk about “hardening” the target, using military lingo as if our schools and other public places are in a war zone.
School officials and public-safety professionals convened that panel discussion Nov. 14 as a kind of situation report on preparedness.
And so, it has come to this: If anyone in the audience was reassured, it was cold comfort.
David Hill invites your comments on this or any other story in the Daily Reporter. You can contact him at [email protected]
