Mt. Lebanon schools enhance safety training for staff and students
The most dangerous attitude any community can foster, according to Mt. Lebanon Deputy Police Chief Aaron Lauth, is the feeling its schools could never be the site of a violent incident such as the Columbine or Sandy Hook shootings.
“If we get complacent, then we won’t know how to respond if an incident does occur,” he said. “I have not read any research that says these incidents are declining in frequency.”
Lauth spoke for the majority of a Dec. 3 presentation at Mellon Middle School, where he and Mt. Lebanon school administrators introduced parents to an enhanced incident response framework, abbreviated as ALICE.
Lauth described the April 20, 1999, mass shooting at Columbine High School as a “game changer” for both educators and law enforcement. Prior to Columbine, neither teachers nor police officers were trained to respond to such emergencies, which likely resulted in a higher death toll.
He explained that the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries at Columbine occurred in the school library, where a teacher and students sheltered in place for an extended period of time – long enough for the teacher to place an infamous eight-minute long 911 call.
Tragically, a clear evacuation route through a back corridor existed during that entire time frame.
“That teacher defaulted to her training,” Lauth said. “At the time, that would have been fire and weather training, where you are trained to get down and stay down.”
ALICE stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate. It is an options-oriented response framework developed specifically for use in schools by police officer Greg Crane and his wife, elementary school principal Lisa Crane. According to the program’s website, over 900 organizations have adopted ALICE since the Cranes began developing it in 2001.
Lauth said the overriding goal of this program is to empower teachers (and in certain cases, their students) to make decisions for themselves, rather than follow a set of rigorously prescribed procedures that may or may not be appropriate for a given situation.
“We have to weigh accountability against survivability,” he said. “For example, if you have to open the door to a neighborhood and tell kids to run, then go for it. There will be a lot of police responding to one of these incidents – from this community and neighboring communities. We’ll figure out where they are. Would we rather know where the kids are because they stayed put and something unfortunate happened?”
Lauth emphasized that the “counter” portion of the ALICE material is fully intended as a last resort option. It highlights different means of distracting or even combating a shooter if cornered. “We are not looking to create vigilantes,” he said.
To date, three Mt. Lebanon police officers and three school staff members have been certified as ALICE instructors. According to assistant superintendent Dr. Ron Davis, the program is being rolled out gradually.
The initial phases of the rollout – training administrators and teachers – are already complete. Presently the district intends to solicit feedback from parents before introducing ALICE to students in an age-appropriate fashion.
Special attention will be paid at the elementary level, assistant superintendent Marybeth Irvin said. Currently the intent is to introduce students to ALICE after a routine lockdown drill, during a “debrief” with teachers and counselors. To that end, district staff have vetted special scripts from Davenport School District for use with elementary age students. Irvin stressed that existing lockdown and shelter in place drills would not become “simulations” of violent incidents.
Deputy Chief Lauth echoed her statements. “We don’t want to scare kids. We don’t want them to go home and have nightmares. But we do want to get over any fear of talking to kids about preparing for these kinds of incidents.”
He compared the process to that of teaching students fire safety techniques such as “stop, drop and roll” – literally a set of step-by-step instructions to follow should you ever catch on fire.
Lauth said the last recorded death in a school fire occurred in 1958.
Parents can post questions and feedback via a link on the Mt. Lebanon School District’s website, www.mtlsd.org.