Maize district’s new active-shooter training goes beyond lockdown

As part of a new approach to dealing with campus threats, Maize teachers will spend the first part of this school year talking with students about what to do if confronted with a violent intruder.

“A lot of it is just simply empowering our teachers and our employees to do what they need to do when they need to do it,” said Lori O’Toole Buselt, spokeswoman for the Maize district. “It’s giving them the resources to make those decisions.”

This summer, Maize joined a number of districts nationwide, including Wichita, that have adopted the “Run, Hide, Fight” response plan, a strategy that gained popularity after a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

The strategy urges people confronted by a shooter to assess the situation and respond accordingly, either by escaping to a safe place, taking cover, or attempting to disarm the intruder, using improvised weapons if that’s their only option.

Maize school board members gave permission last spring for the district to hire SafePlans, a Missouri-based firm that offers advice and training to organizations – including school districts – for implementing security measures.

Richard Bell, executive director of operations and special programs for Maize schools, said about 15 district employees attended an eight-hour training session over the summer that included hands-on simulations in classrooms and hallways at Maize South High School.

The administrators and others spent the day with SafePlans president Brad Spicer, “learning how to secure rooms, practicing situational awareness, figuring out what our best response would be based on where we were with the tools that we had,” Bell said.

Those employees will train staff members at their buildings, Bell said, and each Maize school will conduct an intruder drill highlighting the new strategy for students by the end of this month.

“Past practice was your traditional lockdown,” Bell said. The procedure involves locking doors, turning off lights and silencing cellphones and other technological devices.

“So students will experience quite a change in what they learn as far as their response.”

Maize teachers will train students in the run and hide options, he said, but will not train them to fight.

“SafePlans does not recommend that, and neither does FEMA or (the U.S. Department of) Homeland Security,” Bell said. “That’s an adult-initiated response in the moment of crisis.”

“Run, Hide, Fight” represents a major shift in the way schools respond to an armed intruder. The procedure asks teachers to take a more assertive role in trying to survive, giving them the leeway to ignore lockdowns and run off campus with students or to unleash makeshift weapons against an intruder as a last resort.

Bell said training with students this fall will not include simulations in which a person pretends to be a shooter.

“We don’t have a comfort level with doing that,” he said. “Our students have not been exposed to even the basics of the training, so we’ll do that first.

“I would say it’s not out of the realm of possibility, but it’s not in our current plan.”

In an e-mail to Maize families this week, district officials noted the new crisis plan and reminded parents to talk with children about school safety and the importance of reporting suspicious activity.

The e-mail was “kind of an update on what types of things their children might come home saying they talked with teachers about or heard about,” said Buselt, the district spokeswoman. “Just to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

This story was originally published August 11, 2016 at 6:55 PM with the headline "Maize district’s new active-shooter training goes beyond lockdown."