Schools continue to strengthen safety response

You can't put kids in padded cells. You can't surround them with bubble wrap or follow them everywhere they go. You can't refuse to let them leave the house.

So how can you feel confident that the people you love most in this whole world are going to be safe at a time when school shootings seem to be on the news every other day?

Superintendent Mark Broderson reflects on this question two weeks after a hoax call sent the high school in Sundance into lockdown.

"We want our schools to be kid-friendly and we want them to be parent-friendly, and you try to balance that with keeping the kids safe," he says.

Fluid Event

When it comes to improving school safety, most common suggestions come with hidden downsides. You can't put together an iron-clad, step-by-step escape plan, for instance, because you're dealing with a random event.

Arming teachers means putting the responsibility for stopping a student with a firearm in the hands of the person whose vocation it is to protect them. Using veterans as guards is great in theory, but as Sheriff Jeff Hodge pointed out to the school board recently, less than 15% of veterans actually have the necessary experience.

He also told them that, historically speaking, armed security has not stopped an attacker.

In fact, Hodge said, the only way to truly keep kids safe would be to turn our schools into prisons. That's not what anyone would call a sane solution.

All of these suggestions look at the problem from the same angle: finding the best way to make sure an adult is nearby with the ability to protect kids in a dangerous situation.

Empowerment

Over the past few years, Crook County has come at this problem from the opposite direction.

The active shooter trainings that many students have already taken is based on the idea that the best way to ensure your safety is to take it into your own hands.

The training is about empowerment. It's about giving kids and adults the tools they need to make the kind of split-second decision that will save their lives in a worst-case scenario.

Gone are the days when it was all about locking the door and waiting for the danger to pass – that just has the potential to make people "sitting ducks", Broderson says. Sheltering in place can sometimes be the best answer, but not always.

Faced with an active shooter, a trained individual knows they have choices.

Perhaps it would be best to find a safe place to hide. Alternatively, you may be reasonably able to get out of the building without attracting unwanted attention. If not, perhaps there is something you can do to confuse, distract or delay the shooter.

"When you lock down, there's always going to be the opportunity to do what you need to do to survive," Broderson says.

"Is that leaving through a window? Is it sheltering in place and locking the door? Is it sneaking out the back door? Whatever is the best for your survival at that time."

The correct answer is situational, so you can't tell someone ahead of time what the correct choice will be. Instead, the trainings aim to give people what they need to know the answer for themselves.

"People are going to have to be prepared to make decisions depending on how things play out," Broderson says.

"There's a good chance there's not going to be [a member of law enforcement] there on campus to walk them through it or talk them through it, so our adults in the building have to be ready to make those decisions."

Incremental Improvements

There are always things that could be done better, which is why Broderson wants to see Crook County School District step up its focus on training.

"We're looking at probably getting a little bit more aggressive with that," he says.

Practicing skills needs to be a regular thing, he says, to accommodate changes in staffing over time and – of course – changes in the student population as the kids grow up and graduate.

"It's kind of like preparing for a tornado," Broderson says. "You do the best you can to survive it and it's going to be fluid, but the more we have these trainings, the more people process, 'OK, if this happens, this is what I'm going to do'."

Broderson acknowledges that it's unfortunate that the need to focus on school safety exists in the first place. But with school shootings in the news on such a regular basis, it's not a need that can be ignored.

"It is a concern," he says. "Always our first priority is to keep the kids safe."

The more you practice a skill, the better you get at it. That goes for the kids themselves and the adults who would be tasked with protecting them in an active shooter situation – staff members and, of course, law enforcement.

Situations like the one at Sundance High School last week thus have a silver lining.

"We did learn some things last Monday," Broderson says. Though the threat was a hoax, and law enforcement was confident of that fact before the response was ever launched, it still had to be treated as a real event.

That meant opportunity to test out protocols and processes, which in turn led to meetings between school administration and the Sheriff's Office, which in turn helped find improvements that could be made to communications.

In this case, Broderson acknowledges that one lesson was how tough it is to update parents and members of the community as instantly as they might prefer when the focus for everyone inside the building must be to protect the kids.

"Our first priority is our students and their safety. It's hard to get information to everybody and that's one of the things we learned last Monday," he says.

"Parents are obviously worried and want to know, but at the same time, everybody is running and taking care of the fires that are in front of them at that time. We get word out as fast as we can."

Active shooting training is, of course, not the only school safety protocol in place. There are lockdown procedures are in place for each building, as well as lockout procedures.

In the second scenario, Broderson explains, the threat is not immediate and the response is to lock all exterior doors with the kids inside.

Crook County Sheriff's Office has also been training regularly and thoroughly to respond to a threat and has its own procedures. The upcoming live scenario in May is an opportunity to bring these things together and see how the various involved agencies would work together, and where improvements can be made.

"We'll bring administration from throughout the district to observe and see what went well and what could be done differently," Broderson says. "Even though we're doing it in one building, the other administration will be there to observe."

The live scenario, he says, is part of the ongoing efforts to improve school safety. Perfection may well be impossible, but procedures are honed at every step.

"We have to teach people to handle adversity," he says. "That way, they're ready for whatever does come."