You want to put together a truly top-tier training for response to an active killer in one of the schools in your jurisdiction? You would do well to take a page or two from the playbook put together by Sheriff Greg Champagne and the training unit of St. Charles Parish (La.) Sheriff’s Office.
That agency’s excellent active-shooter training exercise held in February of this year — involving participation of officers, teachers, administrators, students, firefighters, EMS personnel and others — enabled the St. Charles Parish Public Schools to win the 2014 National School Safety Award. Students were made up with realistic-looking injuries and taken to the local hospital by ambulance as police, fire, EMS, and even the local news media descended on the school.
There are two key things other police agencies can learn from this award-winning active-killer response training: Be purposeful in building your relationships, and be patient in building your training.
#1. It’s All About Relationships
There were more than 65 nominations submitted for the 2014 National School Safety Award — given annually by the School Safety Advocacy Council to schools that “go above and beyond in the efforts to keep students and schools safe” — and while it is technically given to the school district, credit for receiving such recognition is shared among all the stakeholders.
Captain Patrick Yoes, public information officer for the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office, told Police1 that it all starts with relationships.
“You might have a belief [among educators] that if you do this type of training in the schools you might be calling attention to the issue [of killers in classrooms]. That’s a mindset that has to change. That all starts with an excellent relationship with the school system, and our agency has that. Without that relationship, this training never would have evolved into what it is,” Yoes said.
Long before the agency and the school administration began conducting the type of scenario training which garnered this national award, they had been working closely together on something called the Safe Schools Program.
While the Safe Schools Program is not the reason for which the 2014 National School Safety Award was won, it is critical to understand that without it, the award likely never would have been possible. It was during the nearly two decades of growing that effort that a solid foundation of mutual trust and respect was built.
“We have a program we put in place where we put officers in schools and we arrest students who fight,” Captain Yoes explained. “With a partnership with the District Attorney’s office, we’ve created a diversion program where first offenders participate in two counseling sessions and community service and the charges are dismissed. We created that system and have been refining it for 19 years. So when it came time to say, ‘Let’s look at what’s happening around the country with some of these high-profile active shooter incidents it made it so much easier to even have that initial dialog.”
In essence, the highly-complex scenario-based training conducted in February is a logical extension of a very simple program to enforce day-to-day juvenile crime — specifically, fighting — in the schools.
“The fact that we are able to plan and participate in a training of this magnitude demonstrates how the partnerships we have in St. Charles Parish contribute to the safety and security of our parish, schools and community,” Felecia Gomez-Walker, superintendent of St. Charles Parish Public Schools, said in a local news report following the award announcement.
#2. Start Small, and Evolve Over Time
This year’s exercise involved flash bang grenades, air assets, and armored vehicles, but the award-winning scenario training conducted in St. Charles Parish was not always as involved or complex. In fact, it has steadily grown from a very simple enterprise to one involving nearly 1,000 people.
“We’ve been doing this training for a while and it’s gotten more elaborate over time,” Yoes explained. “No one training has ever been the same. We’re constantly changing it and testing more systems. We started several years ago with an active-shooter training and it evolved into a much larger and more detailed exercise.”
There is value in starting small and getting larger as you go along because proposing to your local school board (or similar such entity) that you deploy armored vehicles, helicopters, and the local TV stations to the school for a day of training is probably a non-starter for most schools in the country.
“People who don’t normally have to work under those types of pressures — who have never been exposed to it — will have a serious adjustment period. It’s a very emotional thing. Simply the sounds and the smells of flash bangs and kids yelling is enough to set some people off,” Yoes said.
As you begin to roll out a training program, you may consider staring with a simple presentation to a classroom full of teachers, administrators, and perhaps even PTA members. The next step may be a table-top exercise. Then you may do a walk-through of the school with officers telling teachers “This is what we would do here” and just giving them a mental picture of the response before they have to endure a truly life-like training.
As you build toward the scale of what was accomplished in St. Charles Parish, you will want to slowly and strategically add other public safety disciplines and key personnel. Involve those Fire and EMS entities in the planning stage. You can even involve people like the local media, as was done in this year’s exercise. The press is going to show up at a real-world event, so you may as well involve them in the training for it.
A Planned Event with a Lot of People
Captain Yoes put it perfectly when he concluded, “You’ve got a school with two or three thousand kids in it. That’s a small community. If you had a planned event with two or three thousand people in attendance, we’d be setting up a security plan for it. Well, each school day is a planned event with a lot of people.”
Sheriff Champagne and the training unit of St. Charles Parish (La.) Sheriff’s Office should be applauded for their tremendous effort to keep the kids in their schools safe from an active killer in their classrooms.
They should also be imitated to every extent possible.
