School had trained for the worst
Active-shooter exercises prepare students, teachers
For Todd Gregory, a school shooting is not just a nightmare but a looming threat.
“It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time,” Gregory, the security coordinator for Las Cruces schools, said Friday.
He and other Las Cruces school officials met with local, state and federal law enforcement Friday for an active-shooter planning session. The meeting was set months in advance, but Gregory said Tuesday’s shooting at Berrendo Middle School in Roswell was a reminder of the need for planning.
“This helps people understand why we are talking about it,” Gregory said.
School leaders across the country are trying to be
prepared. In recent years, school districts — including those in New Mexico — have taken active-shooter training courses and other measures to prepare for school shootings.
Staff and students at Berrendo, as well as other schools in Roswell and Chaves County, all had such training, Roswell police Cmdr. Eric Brackeen said.
Roswell Police Chief Philip Smith said Berrando staff and students responded to the shooting as well as could be expected. He praised Brackeen and Sheriff Deputy Mike Herrington, who led the training efforts in Roswell and Chaves County.
Brackeen said the teachers at Berrendo did an excellent job of protecting kids by herding them into their classrooms and locking the doors. Teachers followed protocol and did not open their doors — for anyone. The principal and police officers were able to open the doors with separate keys.
It’s unclear how many lives the training would have saved had the shooting gone on longer. Just 10 seconds lapsed between the time 12-year-old Mason Campbell pulled out a 20-gauge shotgun he had brought to school in a duffle bag and when he agreed to put down his weapon. In between, Campbell quickly fired the three rounds he had in the gun, striking two students, before running out of ammunition.
It was teacher John Masterson who approached Campbell and convinced him to give up. Brackeen said teachers are not trained to seek out a confrontation with a shooter but are told it may come to that.
“If you’re in a certain situation, you might have to sacrifice yourself to save those around you,” Brackeen said. He said some Berrendo teachers had grabbed possible weapons like scissors and pens in case the shooter had gotten into their classrooms.
Still, Smith emphasized people shouldn’t become paranoid over school shootings.
“I don’t want to minimize what happened in Roswell because it tore out our hearts, but it’s a rare event,” he said.
Run, hide, fight
On Tuesday morning, at the same time as the Berrendo shooting, Albuquerque Police Department officers were providing active-shooter training to Hope Christian middle and high school students.
APD officers told the students what was happening in Roswell.
“There was an extra gravity that day,” said Katie Swaim, spokeswoman for the private school.
Swaim said APD officers told staff and students the proper way to react in the event of a school shooting, including when to run, when and where to hide and how, if necessary, to fight back. Such instruction is advised by the FBI and New Mexico homeland security officials and is commonly taught among school districts.
These instructions are good guidelines, but staff and students have to react to the situations in which they find themselves, said Michael Baker, head of safety and security for Rio Rancho Schools.
“There are so many different potential situations, it’s hard to come up with one right response,” Baker said.
APS training
Albuquerque Public Schools police conduct active-shooter training at least once a year, and often several times throughout the year, said Steve Tellez, the district’s police chief.
Tellez said APS police work in cooperation with APD and the Bernalillo County Sheriff ’s Department, both of which have resource officers at APS schools.
School staff and students are trained separately and are not involved in the law enforcement training. Tellez said that’s because the law enforcement training involves police moving through the school with their guns drawn, executing the same tactics they would if they were searching from room to room for a shooter.
“That’s why we don’t involve staff and students. We don’t want to point guns at staff and students,” said Tellez, who noted the guns are empty during training.
Some other districts in New Mexico do include students and police in the same activeshooter training drills. Gregory said Las Cruces schools plan to do this.
“We do have to balance (concerns about frightening students) with real-life learning,” said Gregory, adding there is value in making the drills as realistic as possible.
When APS staff and students go through their training, teachers are instructed, for example, to lock their classroom doors, spokesman Rigo Chavez said. Students are trained to be quiet and stay hidden from doorways and windows, so they are not seen by a potentially violent intruder, he said.
This is common protocol for school shooting training.
Rio Rancho Public schools also has active-shooter training that is similar to APS, Baker said.
Still, one of the most important precautions for parents and students is to come forward when they learn about threats, Baker emphasized.
Recently at Rio Rancho High School, a student made verbal threats about harming another student. Eventually, the threats were reported to school officials, and the student making them was identified and disciplined, he said.
Some parents and students, however, had kept quiet about the threats. That was the wrong decision, Baker said.
“When you analyze all the years of school shootings, there is one common denominator. The common denominator is there was a warning,” he said.