Parents get educated about safety protocols

Monroe School District families took the opportunity to learn about new active intruder protocols being taught to their children this year.

Risk and Safety manager Greg Burns explained “Move, Evade, Defend,” a system developed by Washington’s Tactical Training Academy, during an information meeting at Chain Lake Elementary on Wednesday, March 14. He said the issue hits close to home. Burns has been in multiple active shooter situations; during one he watched his friend get shot three times.

“This is personal for me,” he said.

The discussion was held the same day thousands of students throughout the U.S. stepped out of class to protest gun violence and honor the 17 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students and staff killed in Parkland, Florida, last month. Myriad opinions have been brought up since the February mass shooting, including President Donald Trump’s suggestion that school districts arm and train teachers to respond to future threats. Monroe School District spokesperson Tamara Krache was asked if the school district had taken a position on the issue.

“Safety and security of our students and schools is, has been, and will continue to be a conversation that our school board will have,” according to Krache, who did not elaborate.

Burns, whose background is in law enforcement, went over the thinking behind what procedures the school district has adopted. Being injured by an assault is the highest risk facing U.S. citizens, he said, significantly higher than fires or earthquakes, he said. 

Burns stressed schools are some of the safest places in the country, with violent attacks more likely to occur at a mall or movie theater, he said.

There is much that can be done to prevent an incident, Burns said. He asked families if there was any way to win when a violent person is threatening a building. Some raised their hands reticently.

“You can’t win,” Burns said. “Even if everyone survives, there is still deep trauma that affects that community.”

“Move, Evade, Defend” takes that perspective, and works to empower staff and students, he said. If something happens at a school, they are the first ones who can do something about it. Burns pointed to the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. A dozen students and a teacher were killed, while two dozen more were wounded. 

There were multiple deaths in the Colorado school’s lunchroom, Burns said, because they had been trained to stay put, even while the shooters were headed that direction. The kids who decided to leave, despite their training, stayed alive, he said.

“It keeps me up sometimes at night,” Burns said.

Burns offered a number of statistics during his presentation: it can take between 6-60 minutes for law enforcement to arrive on scene, and between 90-98 percent of shootings that occur are known about by another student beforehand.

Burns said to move isn’t so much to evacuate, as it is making an informed decision on the best way to get away from the danger. That can mean going to predetermined staging areas, but sometimes they may be impossible to reach. It is also important the schools strategically use the tools already available. Staff could use the intercom to announce exactly where the person is in a school, he said.

The idea behind evading is to make a space as safe as possible, Burns said. That could mean a lockout,  lockdown, or something else entirely. It is about determining in the moment, not only relying on drills that are familiar.

“What’s the problem with that? We are not conceptualizing the fluidity of this,” he said.

The scenarios will start out simple, and become more complicated as staff and students grow  comfortable with the new protocol, Burns said. Younger kids are not asking to take part in defense activities. They will be prompted to follow their teacher, he said.

“It is a program that is deigned to give people the ability to act, and then we are going to practice that, so over time people can understand what that looks like,” he said.

Hannah Huber’s daughter attends Chain Lake Elementary. She came last Wednesday to participate in the discussion on student safety. She, Burns and other parents spent some time debriefing recent situations that had occurred in local schools at the end of the night.

A week after the Parkland shooting, a Frank Wagner Elementary student reported a suspicious person that had a weapon. It turned out to not be credible. A student had brought an air soft gun to class the month before.

Then Hidden River Middle School went into temporary lockdown on March 1. A student was allegedly threatening others with sharpened pencils in the library. The middle-schooler had become agitated, and the room was evacuated.

Huber said she was very pleased with how quickly the school district got information to parents on the Hidden River incident. Another parent said they had wanted quicker updates during the Frank Wagner events.

Burns said those had served as a good lesson. The school district has seen how badly families want information as quickly as possible. Multiple parents said they are happy to know something is happening immediately, even if the details are uncertain, or turn out to be something completely different later.

Huber and Burns said the best way to make progress is to come together as a community — to decide to take action and move forward with that choice collectively.