The Centralia School District, in partnership with the Centralia Police Department and other local first responders, are dedicating time and resources to critical training they hope they’ll never need to use: response to an active shooter inside a school.
“It’s a low-frequency event with a super high risk, so it’s something our folks need to train a lot more,” said firefighter and paramedic Shay Goff with the Riverside Fire Authority, which had personnel join Centralia Police Department officers and American Medical Response (AMR) emergency medical technicians for an active shooter training exercise at Washington Elementary School on Wednesday.
The training exercise comes two years after the Centralia School District began utilizing the K-12 ALICE Training Program, an active shooter response training program developed by the company Navigate360.
The training centers around teaching school staff and students about the ALICE acronym: alert yourself to the threat; lock down your room with barricades; inform law enforcement and other personnel of the shooter’s location as soon as possible; counter by creating noise, movement, distance and distraction; and evacuate yourself from the danger zone as soon as possible.
“These aren’t necessarily in order because it’s not necessarily a linear plan,” Centralia School District Superintendent Lisa Grant said of the acronym.
Of the training itself, Grant said, “You’re making decisions in the moment, different than in an earthquake drill or a fire drill.”
The Centralia School District began utilizing the program at the end of the 2021-22 school year. The district has since paid for two Centralia Police Department officers, Officer Kyle Stockdale and Officer Michael Barela, to undergo ALICE training so they, in turn, could train school staff and administrators.
Stockdale and Barela completed that training through the Olympia Police Department, according to Centralia Police Commander Paul Evers.
As of November 2022, all Centralia School District administrators had gone through the training and the district was preparing to train staff, according to previous Chronicle reporting.
Over the last two weeks, while schools were still without students for the summer, Stockdale and Barela led an active shooter response training at Washington Elementary School specifically for first responders, running them through possible active shooter scenarios and teaching them the right way to respond to a variety of situations.
“We haven’t done it in quite a while,” Evers said of the training.
“We are thankful that they are willing and asked us to do that, because the more they’re familiar with our buildings, the quicker and better they can respond if, God forbid, something were to happen,” Grant said.
As part of the training, actors, consisting of agency volunteers and community members, geared up with helmets and fake injuries to provide officers and medical personnel with realistic scenarios of what they might face in an active shooter situation.
Officers ran through each scenario alone, without backup, as Evers said that’s most likely how they would end up responding to an active shooter situation.
“Because of the size of our community, if something were to happen, it’s likely one officer would get there before everyone else,” Evers said.
Learning from the tactics other law enforcement agencies used for active shooter incidents around the country in the last few decades, Evers said the general consensus is it’s better to get someone in the building as fast as possible, even if backup isn’t immediately available.
“Every minute we’re waiting, someone’s getting injured,” Evers said.
The Centralia Police Department made an intentional effort to involve Riverside and AMR personnel in the training, as the three agencies would most likely respond together in the event of an active shooter.
“In my 27 years of law enforcement, this is one of the first times that we’re working with fire and EMS in this type of training,” Evers said.
“Hopefully we can just keep building on this in the future,” Goff said.
Centralia School District staff are set to go through a review of the training this upcoming school year, according to Grant.
Future plans include expanding ALICE training to students and parents, which Grant said will be a difficult balance between preparing students for a disaster and not causing them undue distress.
“I wouldn’t say it’s harder training, it’s just a little scarier,” Grant said, later adding, “For us, it’s continuing to build and refine our plans and then continue to train staff, and then (decide), how do we expand that training to others, being very sensitive to it? It’s going to have to look different in elementary (schools) than it is in the high school. (We’ll need to be) sensitive to the stress that it could cause, even while we’re hoping to alleviate stress.”
For more information about the ALICE program, visit https://www.alicetraining.com/.
