Being Proactive - School Shootings

Teachers in hallways monitoring and greeting / screening students and adults in hallway. Enforcement of no hats and hoody hood on head. Close down access points and funnel guests through office only. Don’t open doors for people you don’t know, politely tell them to go to the office. Mainly it’s all about being present and observant.

Sounds like the ALICE method?

First thing we will do in a situation if we are in my classroom is escape. I keep a hammer in my desk so I can bust out the window and then rake out the glass with the hammer. The kids will then jump out of the window onto the ground below (about a 6 foot drop) and will then go into the woods that surround the school. We are not going to sit in a corner of the room and wait there and hope a shooter does not enter the classroom.

While they are jumping out of the window, I will be armed with my hammer and hiding up against the wall next to the door. If it opens, I will take a swing. Once all the kids are out, I will leave the classroom.

Im not a teacher but I would suggest a 10 pound Maul with a 36 inch handle. A hammer would take too long and probably cut you up pretty good even if the glass is tempered. 

I like the way you think. I hope my grand-kids end up in a classroom run by a teacher that has a plan to try and get the kids out of the building rather than hiding and waiting. 

Plus if the perp enters your classroom while you are waiting behind the door one swing with your Maul and that f-ker is down. 

Thank you for this Thread. The bravery some of these teachers display when the chips are down is impressive and appreciated....and most certainly goes way beyond any of your job descriptions. 

Not to threadjack, but am I the only one that thinks it's batsh*t that this conversation has to be had?

Absolutely not! It royally sucks.

I would rather have these conversations and go through these scenarios, praying to God that I never have to put them into practice, than to be blindsided one day and freeze like a deer in the headlights.

For the last several years prior to my retirement, I was the "School Safety Officer."

In the even of an incident, I was supposed to assess and secure the situation, after my students were protected. In addition to shootings, I was expected to go through the building to examine the structure in case of storm damage, explosions, etc.

The "Site Incident Commander" was my Principal, who would have been useless, and the next in the Chain of Command was the "Parent Liaison Officer", a music teacher, who was responsible to prevent the parents from interfering, remaining outside of the parking lot, and communicating with them.

I was the guy who was expected to go through the building during and immediately after any incident occurred, until the first responders showed up.

To that end I was given a bright orange vest to wear, and a notebook with a check list. I figured this was to make me a better target....the kids could move faster than I could.

To start what I am sure will be another discussion, anytime someone tells me that teacher's should be armed, ( and I taught in a school where a gun was fired), I think of the vast majority of the people I taught with, and realize the fact that they would be just as dangerous to themselves and the kids as any perpetrator would be.

I think it's insane it's being had!  I don't agree at all that it has to be had.

Of all the lousy things that could happen to you, where in likelihood does being deliberately shot rank?  Even if people were being shot all the time, what makes you think you'd be more likely to be shot inside a school than outside one?  If someone wants to get you, they'll get you.  If someone really wanted to run up the body count specifically in a school (as if schools were cursed somehow), they'd poison the lunch -- and get away with it, because they could be miles away by the time you dropped dead.

And of all the survival skills you might want to teach children, this is one they already know about.  What child doesn't play war or cops & robbers or cowboys & Indians?  They all know how to duck!

You know the last year someone died in a school fire in the US? 1958.

You know how many people have been shot in a US school since Sandy Hook alone? According to the following srticle, 438 people!

This IS a problem worth addressing.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/15/us/school-shootings-sandy-hook-parkland.html

What do you do when you have doors that won't lock or stay locked in your gym (to the outside and to the hall). We have asked for almost two years for this to be corrected or addressed. Our administration does as much as they can but get shot down over their heads. What do you do in that situation without seeming like you're throwing your administrators under the bus because they truly are trying.

I understand being proactive but I also feel we're an extremely reactionary society when it comes to events like this. This is going to be an unpopular opinion but there are many ways in which we could die that are even more likely to occur and yet we won't be anymore proactive in preventing those from happening. I don't think there's any problem with basic proactive measures and teaching students what to do but if an individual is dead set on harming people I don't think securing entrances, arming teachers, etc is going to stop an individual. What happens before and after school? How would you stop that type of attack? Look at the Las Vegas shooting as an example. Unless we stop living life I don't see how you can completely stop this from happening. I think all of the "security measures" are just putting lipstick on a pig. Unfortunately, until we are ready to attack the core of the problem this will continue to happen.

No, it's not.  438 people shot in schools in the USA over a few years, vs. 108,000 shot in general in 2013 alone in the USA.  Yet we're not rehearsing all our lives what to do if someone's shooting at us anywhere we are.  You think you'll make yourself safer by figuring out ways to escape the school?  I'll just wait until a better time to shoot you.

We drill fire safety because it works.  Some things regarding fire run against some people's intuitions, so for instance the stories of people on fire running, fanning the flames, instead of rolling on the floor or removing clothing.  People may not know to crawl under smokey air to escape.  And so on.  Because most fires are accidents, and even in a fire set deliberately the arsonist isn't usually trying to kill someone, and won't stick around to hinder your escape.

Gun safety's a good idea too -- for the person holding the gun to know -- for the same reason: to prevent accidental injury.  But it's damn silly to try to practice safety vs. someone who's deliberately shooting at you!  If there's someone indiscriminately trying to shoot anyone among a bunch of people, their best tactic is to spread out; the next best tactic is to throw your neighbor out from under cover so that person draws fire instead of you!  You want to practice given a reality like that?

Yes, that's my goal.

A discussion similar to this came up here regarding practicing for every conceivable game situation.  If you had infinite practice time, sure.  But since you don't, you should concentrate your limited time on getting good at situations more likely to come up, instead of wasting it on those that are the least likely.  Every bit of time you put into an extremely unlikely scenario is taken away from getting you better at those that are more likely.

Here we have an extreme example of the same.  How many things are you already so good at that you can stop teaching them to teach this?  If lifesaving is the issue, have you taught your students CPR?  Since that's more likely to be helpful, it should be given priority over shootings.  Since accidental gun injuries of children are likelier than deliberate shootings of them, have you taught them gun safety?  Have you taught them how to swim?  That'd be much more likely to save their lives even if a shooting incident occurred at the school, since there's practically nothing they can do effective against a bullet, but they can all learn how not to drown.

The increase in possible survival would be greater if you taught them how to take over control of a car if the person at the wheel has a stroke or something than how better to duck a shooter!  Yes, it's unlikely to happen & there's not such chance of being effective, but it's still a better bet than shooting protection.

In fact, in an actual shooting situation, there's at least as good a chance that doing something totally random & unplanned would be as good as something that might've been practiced.  For all you know, yelling, "[Random Name] said s/he wants you to stop shooting!" would have a chance of coincidentally having meaning to the shooter & getting the shooter to stop.  Telling a joke might work.  Saying you're a member of some fraternity might work.

But besides all that, practicing this sort of thing feeds the students' paranoia.  It encourages them to think, who'd want to shoot them?  If anything, that might encourage some of them to start killing their peers & faculty, on the logic that the best defense is a good offense, because of suspicion that one of them might be a shooter.

The old take-cover drills vs. atomic bombing made sense, because they have a significant chance to work.  Knowing where the windows are, anticipating flying glass -- that makes sense.  Because nobody was going to enter the bldg. with an A-bomb or H-bomb, it was going to happen outside, & you'd accidentally be in the way of flying debris, a burst of infrared, etc. that you could minimize your chance of being hurt by.  But that's so fundamentally different from someone's going in with a gun deliberately to shoot people, it's incomparable.