Editor’s Note: Coming into the 2022-23 school year, The Dispatch spoke with public school parents, teachers and staff, as well as law enforcement and other sources, about how districts prepare for active shooter situations. These are the final installments of a multi-part series exploring school protocols and training, as well as the costs and benefits of the types of training teachers, students and law enforcement officers receive.

Sitting in a classroom, shots ring out from down the hall and those inside are instructed to hide or lay on the ground and play dead.

The shots get closer to the classroom as the source of the noise walks through the door. Sounds of rooms being cleared and shouts for medical aid fill the air and law enforcement strategically breach the room.

When the threat is neutralized, those in the room are told to put their hands up and get against the back wall. They are then instructed to follow the law enforcement to their designated safe area.

As the instructors for the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) at Texas State University entered the classroom for this June training session at New Hope High School, law enforcement officers followed directions on how to properly disarm the officer acting as a suspect and treat the officers who were assigned to be wounded.

Agencies from four different states assembled for Active Shooter Level I Train-the-Trainer session, which incorporates actual scenarios of past active shooters and potential situations that could arise. It not only teaches law enforcement how to respond to the threat but also how to treat the wounded before paramedics arrive.

The Active Shooter Level I train-the-trainer course takes five days and includes classroom instruction on techniques and methods to deliver effective active shooter training to various groups. It includes written tests and physical drills.

By the end of the training, participants are graded on how well they can teach the course back to their peers and the ALERRT instructors.
They also are given materials of their own to train others on how to respond to an active shooter event.

Each year school resource officers — who must already have at least three years of law enforcement experience — must train 40 additional hours, which includes active shooter training.

“In addition to being a certified police officer and going through the basic law enforcement academy, you have to go through the basic school resource officer course that is set up by (the Mississippi Department of Education),” Columbus Municipal School District chief SRO Natashea Coleman-Brown said. “When we go through training, we get trained by representatives from the Department of Homeland Security. We get training from the people from the attorney general’s office. We get all kinds of training because policing on the street can look a little bit different from policing in the school.”

In a crisis situation such as an active shooter, each school district’s law enforcement must effectively communicate with local law enforcement, fire and rescue and emergency management. School law enforcement keeps open lines of communication at all times with all responding agencies in the area because of this.

“We have a lot of table top discussions that we go over our policies and procedures with the police department, even with the fire department, with emergency management,” Brown said. “In the event that a crisis occurs, you don’t want to have a chaotic scene, so everybody will know their role they’re supposed to play in the event of a crisis.”

Law enforcement training
Stop the killing. Stop the dying.

This is the rule of thumb for law enforcement when walking into an active shooter situation, lead ALERRT instructor Randy Knight said.

When walking into an active shooter situation, law enforcement are not only the line of defense taught to incapacitate the shooter, they are also one of the first to interact with victims.

Knight implored those at the training at NHHS in June to think of the lives they are saving. One of the many skills law enforcement learns at the training is how to properly apply a tourniquet to stop the injured from bleeding out before paramedics can reach them.

“Later on down the road, those kids who you saved, who you stopped from dying, are going to be the ones to thank you, to invite you to their weddings,” Knight said. “Think of those people.”

All law enforcement in the area, including school resource officers, are told they are not to wait for backup if they know of an active threat inside the school. They are taught regardless of equipment they have, they are to work to eliminate the threat immediately.

In the event of an active shooter at Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District, city police would be one of the responding agencies, and Police Chief Mark Ballard said he impresses on all his officers the importance of a quick response and grueling training.

“You have to be proactive in your training and in your delivery,” Ballard said. “Our department has done (the training) and will continue to do it. At the end of the day, a need for speed is tremendous. An active shooter event is one of the most significant challenging events that will ever take place in a community and in a law enforcement agency. So the need to train for that, it has to be hard. You have to push someone outside of their comfort zone. It’s got to be serious, and if it’s anything less, you’re setting your people up for disaster.”

Lauren Rhea is the training coordinator at Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office, and he organized the ALERRT training in June at NHHS. Rhea organizes different trainings for LCSO, but since finding a large empty room for training space can be difficult, often other area law enforcement come to train alongside LCSO.

The training at NHHS included three SROs from Lowndes County School District and one from SOCSD as well as a police officer from Mississippi State University Police Department. The scenarios they assessed and worked through were based on real-life situations that have happened in schools across the country.

“ALERRT bases their scenarios on active events that have happened in the past,” Rhea said. “Naturally it’s the angry student who brings a gun into school. The one (scenario) I witnessed was a parent that was furious about a grade that their child was given. Another one was a domestic (violence) dispute between a husband and wife, where the wife was an instructor and the husband came to confront her.”

SPD and SOCSD have teamed up to allow SPD to have access to blueprints and cameras of all school buildings, so officers who respond can know where they need to approach schools and what they need to prepare for. Officers have a phone app that will allow them to look at cameras and blueprints to see where the threat is.

“While officers are en route to the call, they’re going to know exactly what classroom (the threat) is in,” Ballard said. “All of our supervisors have this app on their phone so they can go straight to that camera on their cell phone as they’re approaching the building and see where the threat is at.”

No. 1 priority
As videos of officers inside Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, getting hand sanitizer and checking their phones as those barricaded in classrooms are screaming and dying, an editor’s note from the Austin American-Statesman can be found on the upper left corner of the screen: “The sound of children screaming has been removed.”

Because of failed responses like Uvalde, many people are losing confidence in law enforcement when it comes to the protection of their children. People want to know that their children are safe.

Knight has experience as a responding officer to an active shooting situation in North Carolina, and he spoke to The Dispatch about police response to a threat.

“On a personal level, I like to tell people you never know how you’re going to respond until the day actually comes,” Knight said. “We all would love to say that I’m going to do X, Y, and Z. … A lot of times we like to anticipate that we’re going to act a certain way, we’re going to do a certain thing or we’re going to behave a certain way, but until we’re actually put in that scenario, we really don’t know how we’re going to respond.”

Knight uses this knowledge of human nature to challenge the law enforcement he trains through ALERRT to question why they are there to learn how to respond to an active shooter.

“Another thing that we challenge them on is if you’re not prepared to face this day, you need to be,” Knight said. “… For years, we used to say (law enforcement was) the first priority because if we were dead, we wouldn’t be able to help you. Now what we’re realizing is that we’re not the first priority because we took an oath that every day we put a badge and gun on that if we have to sacrifice ourselves for you to live, that’s what we’re supposed to do. Our first priority now is you.”

One monumental point all law enforcement heads in the Golden Triangle wanted to hone in on was they are going to do everything in their power to keep children safe at school. Lowndes County Sheriff Eddie Hawkins said the first priority is always those inside the school.

“We want to do everything we can to make sure we’re making school as safe as possible,” Hawkins said. “… There is nothing more important than our children.”

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