Active- shooter drills failed to prepare Parkland
Experts say extra steps needed as tactics shift
Run, hide, fight. Shelter in place. If you see something, say something.
We would love to believe that the horror of a school shooting could be kept at bay by a simple mantra, but as the massacre of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., demonstrated, there is no quick answer to preventing tragedy.
The faculty, administration and students had undergone various levels of “active shooter training,” said Broward County school board member Donna Korn. But the gunman, a former student of the school, was reportedly familiar with the school’s emergency plans, and he appears to have rendered that preparation moot with a flick of a fire alarm.
A 2016 report from the Government Accountability Office found 40 states, including Florida, require schools to perform exercises or drills to test their emergency plans. Does the Parkland attack indicate those are wasted efforts?
“We’ve got the people prepared, we have prepared the campuses, but sometimes people still find a way to let these horrific things happen,” Korn said.
It is common for mass shooters to make detailed plans ahead of the event and to search for lessons to be drawn from other attacks.
But the fact that attackers may engage in new tactics and try to find ways around existing preparations is all the more reason for rigorous training, said campus safety expert Michael Dorn.
Dorn, the executive director of Safe Havens, a non- profit organization that consults schools about campus safety issues, pointed out that Parkland was the fifth school shooting in the U. S. during which a fire alarm was triggered.
Safe Havens recommends several practices that could help save lives in just such a scenario, which Dorn said is “very difficult to address.” Those practices were developed in response to the 1998 shooting at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark. In that attack, two boys, ages 13 and 11, triggered a fire alarm and shot their schoolmates as they came out, killing a teacher and four students and injuring 10 others.
Some of the things Dorn says can be done to prepare for such an attack:
Have police officers respond to all school fire alarms.
Have teachers conduct a “quick peek” before they exit the classroom with students when a fire alarm goes off and during drills. Teachers are taught to look and listen before they open the classroom door and to rapidly visually scan the hallway before they exit the classroom. Students prepare to evacuate while the teacher is doing this.
Teach students not to get too spaced out when evacuating to keep line of sight and verbal communications open with the teacher.
Do “reverse evacuation” drills so students and staff can turn students around more rapidly and smoothly.
Make sure school employees have whatever keys, cards or fobs they need to enter the school rapidly in an emergency. Dorn said some school’s shut down access with cards or fobs during a lockdown. The Parkland shooting is an example of why that approach could be dangerous, Dorn said.
Most importantly, staff should be taught using “scenario- based train- ing” so that they can learn to react and deviate from the plan in place “when what they see and hear suggests that following the plan would be more dangerous,” Dorn said.
It appears that Stoneman Douglas High implemented a “lockdown” or “shelter- in- place” response to an active shooter. Lockdowns have been the standard approach for schools dealing with a threat for nearly two decades, and they should remain the foundation of any response plan, according to a report from the National Association of School Psychologists and the National Association of School Resource Officers.
“Lockdowns involve locking the door, moving students out of sight, and requiring students to remain quiet within the room,” the report says.
Dorn said he agrees that lockdowns “have proven to be the most reliable method so far.” He pointed to a November shooting at a California elementary school as an example of a quickly implemented lockdown that likely saved many children’s lives.
But too much focus on one type of response, even lockdowns, in place of teaching staff and students to think on their feet can be a mistake, Dorn said.
An effective plan should be based on the physical layout of a school, rely heavily on training simulations with various scenarios and be regularly updated, according to Dorn.
But no training program is effective enough to guarantee another attack like the one in Parkland won’t happen again, said Joseph A. LaSorsa, a former Secret Service agent.
When confronted by a heavily armed, determined shooter, “unless you’re operating a Fort Knox, unless you have a military base — and even then the checkpoints are vulnerable — there’s not much you’re going to do,” he said.