Schools participate in active shooter training

A police officer stands in a classroom at Whitefish High School speaking to a group of teachers when the sounds of gunshots ring out from down the hallway.

Everyone is startled, but with little hesitation they spring into action. A man with a rifle bursts into the room and is immediately tackled and disarmed by several teachers, who hold him down in a headlock on the floor. A barricade of desks and chairs is created behind him to prevent another potential gunman from entering at the door, which has been tied shut with an extension cord wrapped around a foundation pole in a corner of the room.

Then an air horn goes off, and everyone relaxes.

“That was great,” the police officer playing the part of the gunman says, taking off his protective helmet and sweating from the heat of his protective suit. “The average attack happens in 15 seconds — You guys had me down in about five.”

This was one of several simulated, but seemingly real, scenarios the teachers from Whitefish high and middle schools experienced during a recent active resistance training session at the schools.

The training was put on by local volunteers from the Whitefish, Kalispell and Missoula police departments and the Montana Army National Guard that have been trained by the Safariland Group, a national defense and training organization. The session was the emergency response to an armed intruder course, which according to Safariland is “designed to maximize the initial efforts of staff to afford the best chance of survival and to minimize casualties.”

Teachers from Muldown Elementary and other district staff will go through the same training in January.

During the recent session, trainers focused on three priorities — run, lock and fight. Rather than locking doors and hiding under desks during a lockdown, as has been taught in the past, participants were taught an approach that provides more options. If a safe and easy exit of the building is available, then getting out safely should be the first option. Lock refers to taking steps to create a secure space no one can enter. And, should an intruder pass through the threshold into a classroom, the last resort is to fight.

High school Principal Kerry Drown said he and other members of the district’s Quick Response Team, which oversees school safety and crisis management for the entire district, found the training after studies on older lockdown methods of response proved to be ineffective.

“One of our goals is to be as proactive as possible and stay current with the best practices,” he said. “Teachers need to be equipped with more strategies than passively sitting and hiding in a corner in a classroom. This is the first time since I’ve been in the school district that we have designated a training day like this for all staff.”

The full-day of training began with two hours of lectures in the middle school, where staff members were introduced to the run, lock and fight principles.

Then the teaching blocks began, half-hour sessions that covered the basics of skills like self-defense, medical care, disarming weapons and creating barricades. During each block, staff members received hands-on training.

Staff then were asked to apply those techniques during several simulated scenarios. The sounds of blanks being fired down the hall prompted participants to react depending on the situation — either to run and find the safest exit; or lock by barricading the door and preventing anyone from entering; or fight, taking down the intruder and disarming him.

“I think of it as a toolbox,” Drown said. “We’ve just added more tools to the toolbox, so depending on the situation we have a variety of things to choose from and hopefully we’ll pick the tool that best fits the situation.”

According to the website Mass Shooting Tracker, which defines a mass shooting as an incident in which at least four people are killed or wounded, there have been 363 mass shootings in the United State this year.

For Kalispell School Resource Officer Chad Fetveit, who was part of the volunteers putting on the training, this kind of instruction is a collective endeavor from people all across the area.

“I think it’s amazing, we’ve got a huge community of people throughout the Valley that all come together with one common goal, and that’s to keep the schools safe,” Fetveit said.

Getting the hands-on experience is crucial for teachers to feel confident should a crisis ever come to Whitefish, he added.

“I think they learn a lot about themselves,” he said. “How people react under stress in any given situation is dependent on their level of involvement in training. We want to empower the school and staff members to be proactive in taking part in their own safety.”

High school English teacher Chris Schwaderer took part in the training. For him, hiding in a lockdown, as previously taught, never seemed a natural response to a potentially dangerous situation.

“It never really seemed like the most effective approach,” he said. “Personally, I was conflicted, I thought that if a situation like that went down, my instincts tell me that I would want to fight or flee and it didn’t make much sense to present ourselves as targets. Also, as a parent, I would certainly hope that other teachers would do the same thing and have the same kind of concerns and not want to give up without a fight.”

Schwaderer said a lot of people might think that Whitefish is an idyllic community where a mass shooting can’t happen, but that’s not the reality and it’s important for teachers to be trained for these types of situations.

“It makes me more sad than anything, as a father of a kid in the district,” he said of the active shooter incidents. “I just always have a lot of compassion for the parents and the kids and the schools, and I just think it’s so sad that it’s something we have to worry about in this day and age.”

When students, teachers and staff moved into the new high school building in 2014, Drown said conversations about escape routes began to come up. Staff wanted to know how to handle the situation in a new building.

“Then anytime there’s an incident somewhere across the nation, it definitely raises people’s awareness everywhere, and ours in particular, and that’s where those questions come up,” Drown said.

Between situations, staff members would bring up questions for the instructing officers. One topic was how to talk to students about the training they’d spent the day learning, and the advice the teachers were given was to be upfront and honest. There’s no way to get each student through an eight-hour training, Drown said, but there are ways to make them more mindful of their environment in case something does go wrong.

“We need to start to bring [the students’] awareness to their surroundings and the resources available, their awareness of the various ways to exit the building,” he said. “People come into the building and they go where they need to go and they never really start looking around to see what alternative exits there are — exits right out of the classroom, ground level, windows.”