A mother in Washington state was shocked when her child came home and told her that they had trained on how to react if a school shooter entered the room.
The kindergartner told Lisa Guthrie, the mother, that the training included throwing books at the shooters.
“At a recent PTA meeting, we brought in some of the police officers who work closely with our school district to talk about ALICE, which is their approach to handling active shooter situations. One part of it is that if the shooter does enter the room where kids are at, the kids are told to run around, yell loudly, throw things like books or wads of paper, etc. Just be a distraction,” Guthrie said in a Facebook post that was shared over 18,000 times as of Feb. 20.
“At first I was like, really? you think a shooter armed with a machine gun is going to confront Samantha armed with a book and just say oh, nevermind, I won’t kill her? And then it punched me in the gut: If she’s face to face with a shooter, she’s going to die regardless. The goal will be for her and her classmates to make their deaths take 20 seconds rather than 10. That’s 10 more seconds for other kids to run, 10 more seconds for first responders to get to the scene and take out the shooter. A lot of lives can be saved in 10 seconds…”
The ALICE training is the “number one active shooter civilian response training for all organizations,” according to its website.
The training institute gives instructions on how to alert, lockdown, inform, counter, and evacuate.
The website states that ALICE gives different responses to students, teachers, and administrators because each active shooter situation is different.
The training includes different courses of action that is aimed at minimizing the loss of life.
Around 95 of every 100 schools in the United States now conduct some form of school shooter training.
Vox reported that 32 states have laws requiring schools to conduct lockdown drills specifically while six states require active shooter training.
Several states require shooting simulations with police officers, including Missouri.
“We are working in schools every day with innocent children who see school as a safe place,” said Henderson Lewis, Jr., the superintendent of the Orleans Parish School Board in Louisiana. “We must do everything we can to prepare our kids for an unfortunate scenario.”
From NTD.tv
Recommended Video:
