ALICE Training Both Schools and Scares
Staff Reporter describes her experience with program school district is considering to train students how to respond to intruders
Noreen Hyslop//The Daily Statesman
Students at Richland Junior High in Essex, Missouri, barricade a classroom door during ALICE training. Students were taught how to react to the threat of an armed intruder in their school. Shaker is exploring ALICE training as an alternative to lockdowns and, according to Superintendent Gregory C. Hutchings, Jr., will have some kind of enhanced training program in place by next school year.
I was ALICE trained.
Before I came to Shaker, I attended St. Paschal Baylon in Highland Heights. It was a small private school, with about 500 students from preschool to eighth grade.
It was your typical grade school, really. Student artwork covered the walls, inspirational cat posters hung in classrooms and students ate barely edible school lunches in the cafeteria every day.
Then one day last year, something unusual happened. The principal announced an assembly, but split us up by grade level and sent us to different locations. As my class followed our teacher down the hall, we wondered what was going on. When police officers greeted us in the room, we knew this assembly would be different. Once everyone was in their seats, one of the officers began narrating a slideshow. He started talking about ALICE and explained to us what “alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate” would mean in our school.
After the slideshow ended, one of the officers pulled out a bag full of textbooks, wooden blocks, cardboard boxes and a Nerf gun. Everyone in the room seemed confused as the officer distributed the items to students. Once his bag was empty, the police officer handed the Nerf gun to another officer, who then left the room. The first officer instructed us to throw whatever we were holding at the officer with the Nerf gun, who would represent a violent intruder, as soon as he entered the room. Our goal was to distract him enough to keep him from shooting.
The officer with the Nerf gun burst into the room, and we launched books, blocks and boxes toward him. After only a few seconds, nobody had anything left to throw. The first officer told us we had been successful; the officer with the Nerf gun had only shot a few times. We continued to repeat the excercise. Then we learned how to barricade a door using a table and a belt.
One of the police officers even taught us the proper way to break a window — hit the corners, not the center — so we could flee the building.
Finally, we were all asked to return to our seats. We were all a bit shaken. As the officer went through the slideshow once more, I remember seeing the police station’s phone numbers, and one of the officers encouraged us to save the numbers in our cell phones. My friends and I immediately pulled out our phones and typed in the numbers.
The training we had just received had convinced us we were going to need them.
A few weeks later, the principal announced that we would practice evacuating the building as if we were running from a violent intruder. Depending on what section of the building he called out, we should either barricade our doors, lock down and practice grabbing heavy objects to throw at the intruder, or quickly and quietly get out.
While my class practiced, I saw some of the younger children treating the drill as a game, pretending they were spies or ninjas.
I can’t say whether ALICE is a good idea for Shaker, but I’m definitely not looking forward to going through training again.
This story will appear in The Shakerite’s upcoming April print issue.
