Lake officials learn in shooting exercise
Parkland shooting prompts School Board members’ training
TAVARES — Karen Briggs, the Lake County school district’s chief financial officer, pretended to be a school shooter Monday as she went from classroom to classroom, discharging bits of plastic with an imitation pistol at School Board members and other officials hiding beneath desks and chairs.
In one minute and 27 seconds, the concealed-carry holder discharged eight shots and hit eight people in the mock active-shooter exercise at the Lake County Sheriff’s Office Public Safety Institute prompted by the mass shooting in Parkland.
“Even as a survivor, I kept waiting for it,” said School Board Chairwoman Stephanie Luke, who avoided Briggs by hiding under a desk.
Luke and more than a dozen other school officials, including Lake County Schools Superintendent Diane Kornegay, took part in the exercise as part of training by Lake Sheriff’s SWAT commander Lt. Ralph McDuffie, who discussed shooters’ profiles and advocated for a more proactive “options-based approach” to run, barricade or fight back if an attack were to come.
“If you don’t want students to be fish in a barrel, then take away the barrel,” said McDuffie, who was a deputy in 1995 when Keith Johnson, 14, shot and killed his 13-year-old classmate Joey Summerall, 13, at Tavares Middle School, just down the road from where they were training Monday. Johnson was arrested a short time later by deputies in a nearby orange grove.
Since the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead, Lake school officials have been zealous to learn more about preventing shooters
and protecting students, surveying their teachers and meeting with student representatives about what to do.
The district has seen at least three of its students arrested after they talked about shooting up their respective schools and a senior at Lake Minneola High School brought a Glock on campus before shooting himself during a fire drill in November, according to authorities.
On Monday, school district leaders whipped out pens and notepads as students and digested what McDuffie had to say.
“If you have this strategy of kids running, what if you have more than one shooter?” School Board member Bill Mathias asked. “Wouldn’t you be endangering kids?”
“You can ‘what-if’ it all day long, but you have to go off bestcase probabilities,” said McDuffie, who added the majority of school shooters act on their
“You can ‘what-if ’ it all day long, but you have to go off best-case probabilities. Teachers need to accept that one of their students could get hurt.” Lake Sheriff ’s SWAT commander Lt. Ralph McDuffie
own. “Teachers need to accept that one of their students could get hurt.”
McDuffie embraces a morechaotic approach than the single-file lines commonly seen during fire drills. He said running, barricading the doors and even fighting the shooter is a more effective way to counter the unimaginable.
“If you treat them [the students] like prey, then that’s what they’ll be,” he said.
He also doesn’t believe in the use of code words over intercoms to alert teachers about shooters.
“Everything should be clear talk,” he said.
Many school shooters, according to a 2004 U.S. Secret Service and Department of Education report, don’t come “out of the blue” but carry out their attack after harboring long-held grievances.
Often, they will talk about their idealization of violence — a crucial time to “see something, say something,” McDuffie said — and research their attack.
Eighteen months before Nikolas Cruz shot up Douglas High, he was banned from practicing shooting skills with the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps because school staff was worried by his fascination with guns, according to mental health records.
“If they’re smart, they’ve done their research,” McDuffie said. “They know they won’t have the time to break down a barricade” because law enforcement is coming.
School staff and McDuffie conducted four scenarios, trying out different methods of hiding, running, barricading and fighting. Only two scenarios saw “casualties”: hiding and fighting.
When one school staffer opened the door to a dark classroom, her fake pistol in hand, she was pelted with tennis balls — stand-ins for what would otherwise be real objects — and fired off four shorts before another employee lifted her up and restrained her. Only one person was hit.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” School Board member Marc Dodd said.
Board members are expected to take up whether to introduce a similar four-hour active-shooter course to teachers and students at an upcoming workshop.