Public safety leaders and a representative from the Indiana Department of Education sat on a panel on Tuesday to talk school safety with Clark-Pleasant Community School Corporation..
As school safety continues to be on many minds, public safety leaders in the Clark-Pleasant community say they are confident in their ability to respond to any active threat at schools throughout the county.
School safety was the topic of discussion at Clark-Pleasant Community School Corporation’s Superintendent’s Coffee event Tuesday evening. Police chiefs from Greenwood, Whiteland and Clark-Pleasant police departments, Johnson County Sheriff Duane Burgess, Whiteland and Bargersville Fire Chief Eric Funkhouser, representatives from Johnson County Public Safety Communications and Ryan Stewart from the Indiana Department of Education sat on a panel to answer questions about safety in schools.
School safety is and remains a priority for Clark-Pleasant schools, Superintendent Patrick Spray said Tuesday. The school district passed the first successful school referendum in the county in 2018 for school safety funding, which created the school’s police department.
“Four years later, I can say that I’m very proud of how far we have come, but also understand that keeping communities and the school safe is a constant effort, which involves all stakeholders,” Spray said.
Discussion centered on how police and fire training has evolved over the years to respond better to school safety emergencies, such as shootings or other threats.
Officials stressed that teamwork and training together is key for agencies to respond effectively to a potential threat in a school. Clark-Pleasant, in particular, has its own police department, and its schools sit in different police and fire jurisdictions in Greenwood, Whiteland, New Whiteland and the Sheriff’s Office.
If an active threat happened at any school, likely all agencies in the county would respond. Burgess emphasized that he communicates regularly with the other police and fire departments throughout the county to be aware of everything going on, he said. All police and fire agencies also train together on incident command.
“We all work well together. We communicate. I talk to the Greenwood chief the Franklin chief every day, as the three largest agencies, we communicate so that we can make things better for this county,” Burgess said.
County agencies have been through several multi-agency active shooter drills over the years, including two conducted at the Greenwood Park Mall. Continuously training together is key, Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison said.
Another multi-agency active shooter drill is set to take place at Greenwood Community High School over winter break this year, he said.
“I can tell you that I’m pretty confident in the agency sitting up here, and the agencies in this county because we train and we have done multiple trainings together,” Ison said. “I don’t think you’re going to see an incident here in Johnson County, where your first responders don’t immediately go in to protect your children.”
Greenwood just last month experienced a mass shooting at the Greenwood Park Mall, where three people and the gunman were killed. Ison was asked about what went right, and what went wrong during the response.
Two factors outside of their control helped “immensely,” he said. One was the armed citizen who shot the gunman 15 seconds after he opened fire in the food court, and the other was the fact that the mall was near closing time, so there were fewer people inside.
He said “a lot more went right than wrong,” and 16 local, state and federal agencies responded quickly.
“I am grateful for all of the stars aligning prior to the first responders arriving,” Ison said.
Officials also talked about reviewing response reports for school shootings that have happened elsewhere, including at Parkland High School in Florida and more recently in Uvalde, Texas. Reviewing these reports help influence how agencies can train and prepare, in case they are in these situations.
Because of that, responses to active shooter situations have changed over the years, Whiteland Police Chief Rick Shipp said. For example, officers are trained to now enter a building with an active threat immediately, instead of waiting for SWAT teams to arrive to assess the situation.
“The primary failure there (in Uvalde) was lack of entering school,” Ison said, following up. “We learned that back in the 1990s with Columbine … just as Chief Shipp said, the response back then would have been to call out a SWAT team which would take 20 to 30 minutes.”
Ison also said that if there ever an active threat reported at a school, parents should not flood to the scene. Adding more people to the situation can make it confusing and more difficult for first responders to quickly ensure everyone inside is safe.
Fire and EMS have also evolved in how they respond to active threats, Funkhouser said. First responders in the past would wait outside for police to completely clear a building, but now they are going in sooner, to hopefully save more injured people, he said. Because of that, first responders are now getting equipment such as bullet-proof vests and tactical helmets for active threat incidents.
Preparing in advance for this situation is also crucial for all public safety agencies, he added, because of the amount of manpower needed to respond to an incident like a mass shooting.
“Understanding that it takes hundreds of officers, and it’s going to take, you know, 20-30, fire trucks, ambulances, different things that are going to be there,” Funkhouser said. “So, you know, working on the front end now to kind of look at it and see what is this going to take so when something like that happens, you’re not trying to call it out in that moment.”
In addition to outside police agencies, Clark-Pleasant has its own police department with seven officers and three K-9’s, and additional school resource officers assist as well.
Clark-Pleasant Police Chief Chad Pryce said having law enforcement on the school campuses is more than just to respond to emergencies, but to also build relationships with students — something that also increases safety.
“Without that relationship, there is no change. And this is where we think we know and it’s been proven that change can happen here with having law enforcement, that authority figure, in these buildings that can not only influence for their lives, but just the overall safety of everything,” Pryce said.
