Bourne to teach students how to confront school shooter
By Beth Treffeisen
Posted Nov 30, 2018 at 9:22 PM
Updated Dec 1, 2018 at 6:31 AM
In wake of fake threat, parents get primer on planned training program.
BOURNE — With school shootings making headlines across the country, the Bourne school district is taking steps to train staff members and students on how to counter an active shooter if such a situation happens closer to home.
“I think it’s a sad state we have to do it,” a middle school parent said Thursday night.
A school security forum was held at Bourne High School to inform parents of the active shooter training that students will take part in after the holidays.
On the morning of Oct. 3, the middle school principal received a phone call saying an active shooter was in the school. Although the threat was determined not to be credible, the experience was real, schools Superintendent Steven Lamarche said.
“We will not stop researching, reviewing, reflecting, adjusting and enhancing our safety program,” he said at the forum.
Now, ALICE is the direction in which the school district is going, David Lundell, the middle school’s assistant principal, said.
ALICE stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate. The ALICE program does not set a sequence of actions or steps, Lundell said. An individual may use only one part of the program or all five, he said.
“It’s about options,” he said. “It’s about life skills, whether it is in a mall or in a school.”
Research has shown that civilians have stopped active shooter events twice as often as police intervention, Lundell said. The reason, he said, is because they were already there.
The old method of response told students to sit down and be quiet and hope that the next noise they heard at the door was a police officer, Bourne High School Assistant Principal Kenneth Girouard said.
“ALICE thinks we can do more,” he said.
Major changes include alerting people in the building with as much information as possible as to where the threat is, he said.
If students go into lockdown and cannot evacuate, they are now asked to barricade the entrance with objects in the classroom such as desks, filing cabinets and chairs, Lundell said.
The biggest change is to confront the intruder.
Students and teachers are asked to gather objects in the room to throw at the intruder if he or she enters, Lundell said. “Remember there is strength in numbers,” he said.
Scream, yell, throw things and keep throwing things, said Bourne police Detective Daniel Cox, school resource officer. A person cannot take the offensive when distracted, he said.
Then, if possible, get five people, or one person per appendage, to bring the intruder down, Cox said. Dislodge the weapon from the aggressor and secure the weapon, he said.
“The threat is real,” Cox said. “At this point it is about survival.”
Although confrontation may not be easy to think about, the old strategy made students sitting ducks, Lundell said.
Beyond ALICE training, other improvements have been made in the past few years to ensure student safety, Lamarche said.
A few include making sure there is a single entry point at each school during the school day and making sure all hallway classroom doors are equipped with lockdown magnetic strips, he said.
In addition, school principals are now connected with the Bourne police through a two-way communication system within their offices, he said.
One idea for improving school safety includes finding a way to communicate to all students on their cellphones, parent Judy Ariagno said. Talking to her children after the incident in October, she learned that they found comfort in knowing what was going on by texting classmates and siblings in other buildings.
“It was scary for us parents,” she said, and it was scary for students who had siblings in another school.
Staff members are already trained in ALICE. A refresher class for teachers will take place Dec. 12. New staff will be trained Dec. 14.
Students at Bourne Middle School will have training Dec. 14, and the rest of the students in the district will have a date set after the holiday break, Lamarche said.
″(School safety) priority is not just a job for me and for many others in our system and first responders,” he said. “It’s personal; we have children whose safety and well-being is part of every thought in the Bourne Public Schools for us.”
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