At Edinburgh Community High School Saturday, officers took turns playing the role of a shooter, simulating different scenarios during which an officer might have to confront a school shooter and firing rounds of non-lethal ammunition, if the shooter attacked an officer.
The drills were part of active threat training, which tries to place officers in situations that resemble previous school attacks and critique their reactions, said Doyne Little, Edinburgh police chief.
“Once we’re in there, we’re taught to find the threat and stop the threat. We go to the threat,” Little said. “(Students) know if there is an active shooter situation you run, hide and then fight. If they can’t get out of the building, get the door barricaded and hide themselves.”
The drills resemble prior school shootings in order to make the drills realistic, Deputy Chief Hector Mercado said.
“They’re scenarios that have happened with other departments,” Mercado said. “The point of this is to train officers realistically, sometimes you’ll have to engage an individual by yourself. The point is, as long as you’re doing some of the right things, you might be able to talk that person down. Some of these scenarios teach officers to handle a barricaded subject or a hostage situation and it helps officers make split second decisions without command there. Seconds count, lives matter, officers have to be able to do all these things themselves. That’s the point of practicing these drills.”
During the most recent school year, there were 27 school shootings reporter around the country. During the 2020-21 school year, there were 34 school shootings, a record, according to Education Week. The most recent school shooting happened in Uvalde, Texas, and the shooter killed 19 children.
Similar active shooter training occurred last month at Clark-Pleasant schools. Clark-Pleasant Police Chief Chad Pryce said the drills build confidence among officers so a situation like the one seen in Uvalde, where officers failed to apprehend the shooter while he killed students, doesn’t happen locally. At the Clark-Pleasant training, 22 officers rom Center Grove Police Department, Franklin Police Department and Franklin Township school police trained together, Pryce said.
“It’s crawl-walk-run. It’s a slow pace at the beginning and then there’s a larger scenario. It helps build their confidence and knowledge base so they know what to do and how and when to do it,” Pryce said. ”There are real-life scenarios at the end of training to accomplish what they want to accomplish.”
At Clark-Pleasant, the 2018 Noblesville West Middle School shooting served as a wakeup call.
The school district quickly put a referendum on the ballot to increase school safety through a property tax hike, which won over the majority of voters in Clark and Pleasant townships. The successful referendum resulted in the creation of the Clark-Pleasant Police Department, which has seven full-time officers and safe visitor entries, meaning just one entry at each building isn’t locked and that entry requires check in for visitors, Pryce said.
“That’s the biggest part of Clark-Pleasant being proactive, creating the police department,” Pryce said. “From there with the chief of police, making them the school safety specialist puts me in a position to organize, plan and train anyone who might be involved in school safety, beyond just the police department. It’s all part of the referendum, we have two full-time employees monitor cameras throughout the day.”
Those cameras have about 1,400 angles and views of Clark-Pleasant schools, he said.
Center Grove schools, which has had a police department since 2007 and has six officers, opened its emergency operations center in January. The center includes offices, K9 kennels, a security camera monitoring room and space for sheriff’s office deputies. The center is one of the most recent security efforts at the school district, said Bill Long, assistant superintendent of operations.
“At the Emergency Operations Center, we can monitor over 700 cameras, and we control access to all our buildings,” Long said. “We screen guests when they come in and all our classrooms can lock down remotely.”
In the wake of a school shooting in Uvalde, Franklin schools presented on its safety plans during its June school board meeting.
During the presentation, operations director Jeff Sewell discussed the school district’s relationship with local law enforcement. Unlike at Center Grove and Clark-Pleasant schools, Franklin schools does not have its own police department.
“The tragedy in Texas prompted questions about our safety structures. The foundation of our philosophy is school is a safe space for kids to grow and reach their potential. It takes a community effort and diligence to do that,” Sewell said. “We collaborate closely with the Franklin Police Department and the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department, which provide police powers to our school resource officers. That partnership remains strong and we have a great partnership with the 911 center, and 24/7 monitoring of our anonymous reporting line. There are timely responses if anything of emergency nature comes through.”
The school district is also working on replacing exterior doors, adding security cameras and participating in multi-district disciplinary exercises, such as the active threat training at Edinburgh Saturday.
Indian Creek schools started its school resource officer program three years ago, and the school district has added exterior cameras to cover more of campus, said Tim Edsell, superintendent.
“Our (school resource officers) know our buildings incredibly well and they’re able to make quick, effective decisions and we have a lot of faith and trust in them,” he said.
One of the most important ways to prevent a school shooting, however, is to catch the warning signs in students, Long said.
“We’ve partnered with Community Health and have mental health counselors in our buildings. We train staff on how to be aware of students. We have a suicide checklist that our counselors have been trained on to figure out how kids are threatening to hurt themselves or others,” Long said. “We’ve added additional social workers throughout our school corporation and a director of mental health and counseling.”
Indian Creek schools are funding these programs from general fund budget because the community didn’t pass a referendum to pay for mental health services.
