The New Norm for Back to School: Active-Shooter-Response Training

For more than a decade at the University of California at Irvine, Jessica Millward’s in-class emergency-preparation lesson centered on earthquakes and fires. But after a year on sabbatical, and multiple university shootings around the country, the associate professor of history feels compelled to prepare her classes this semester for a now all-too-common threat: the active shooter.

Millward, who teaches a course on black women and violence, plans to place a note atop her syllabus about active-shooter protocol and safety measures. She’ll also talk with her students about how to react to an armed intruder on campus. School shootings, she said, have been in the back of her mind since a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, and the proliferation of gun violence this past year — including two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, this month — made her realize the importance of “actually having a discussion” about a possible attack.

“It’s very disheartening that this is how you should begin the first day of class,” Millward said. “The first day should be about capturing the students’ attention, making them want to enroll. It shouldn’t be about safety, but it’s become necessary.”

Across the country, as faculty and students return to campuses large and small, orientations and required online trainings are shifting focus to the worst-case scenario. For new teaching assistants, Michigan State University is offering a workshop on “proactive and reactive strategies” to armed attacks. The faculty at George Mason University was briefed on response protocol, which was put into action on Tuesday when the university sent out an armed-suspect alert (it was a mistake; the safety director later apologized).

It was an eventful 24 hours for campus safety: In addition to the George Mason false flag, Louisiana State University sent out an armed-intruder alert on Tuesday, in the middle of freshman orientation, telling constituents to “run, hide or fight,” a standard emergency-response phrase. (It was another false alarm.) Later that night, four college students were shot at a block party near Clark Atlanta University. No one was killed, but two students from Spelman College and two from Clark Atlanta were taken to the hospital with injuries.

So frequent are campus shootings that many of them become just a blip in the national consciousness. In the past five years alone, there have been fatal shootings at Central Michigan Delta State, Florida State, Northern Arizona, Savannah State, Seattle Pacific, Tennessee State, Texas Southern, and Winston-Salem State Universities; the Universities of California at Los Angeles and of North Carolina at Charlotte; and at North Lake, Sacramento City, Umpqua Community, and Wayne Community Colleges.

“My concern is that mass shootings have become so normalized in the United States that this” — active shooter training — “is how we kick off the academic year,” said Kortney Sherbine, an assistant professor of education at Utah State University.

As part of Sherbine’s orientation this fall, she and other College of Education professors attended a meeting about “important security information.” Campus police officers showed a video of a disgruntled gunman entering a school board meeting. What is the proper way to respond to this gunman? she and her colleagues were asked. How do you deal with a crazed and armed intruder?

Sherbine understands the need to prepare teachers for emergencies, but the training rubbed her the wrong way for a couple reasons. The video’s conclusion was unclear — it ended with off-camera gunfire and no succinct resolution — and the exercise, to Sherbine, felt a bit like fear-mongering.

The exercise also raised the issue of onus, of who is responsible for stopping a deranged man (it’s almost always a man) with a gun, a concern shared by both Sherbine and Millward.

“We were releasing blame from the shooter and putting it on the victim,” Sherbine said. “The discourse now is ‘run, hide, fight.’ So I guess I did learn something. I don’t know what an alternative way to talk about that would involve, because I don’t want to sit around and think this is the way things have to be. There’s got to be a better way.”

Melissa Reeves has spent the past two decades trying to find that better way. Working to make classroom responses more efficient and safe, she’s been at the forefront of emergency efforts since Day One of the modern school-shooting era: On April 20, 1999, Reeves was in her first year as a school psychologist in the Denver area when two gunmen opened fire at Columbine High School. That night, Reeves and colleagues served as therapeutic counselors at a nearby emergency-room waiting area — initiating a trajectory of school-safety studies that would lead her to the presidency, in 2016-17, of the National Association of School Psychologists.

Reeves, now an associate professor of psychology at Winthrop University, helped compile NASP’s best-practice considerations guide for dealing with active shooters, which includes lockdown protocols and how to talk about mental health after traumatic events. In training for these scenarios, Reeves said it’s imperative that exercises themselves don’t cause trauma for attendees. She said institutions can prepare for emergency scenarios without subjecting professors to “highly sensorial” trainings, like those this year in Indiana, where elementary teachers were lined up and shot by local police, execution-style, with plastic pellets.

As the police increasingly collaborates with schools for emergency-response training, Reeves said some fail to understand the psychological impact of simulating mass murder in a place of learning.

“We don’t light a fire in the hallway to practice fire drills,” she said. “We do not have to do highly sensorial active-shooter drills to be ready for active shooters.”

Katie Bailey, a visiting lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, understands the important, and unfortunate, necessity of emergency training. Her new faculty orientation included an hourlong session of speaking with police officers and watching informational videos on active-shooter safety protocol.

“It kind of sucks that we have to go through it or that we have to deal with it,” she said. “But it is valuable information.”

Campus safety measures aren’t limited to active-shooter response training. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is installing classroom door locks in a central academic building this month as part of a pilot safety program, and Ohio State University has added hundreds of locking mechanisms in its classrooms. At the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, the campus police plans to increase officer presence.

Reeves believes real change, however, begins with politicians, and shifting a societal culture prone to violence. As for proper training, she said, it requires input from law enforcement, mental-health professionals, and faculty members.

And the inclusion of that last group, while important, is all too indicative of the problem.

“We’re educators; we’re not experts in safety,” Reeves said. But in discussing the state of American education, she had to admit: “We’re now becoming experts in safety.”

Correction (8/22/2019, 11:43 a.m.): This article originally identified Melissa Reeves as a graduate student at the University of Denver when the Columbine shootings took place; she was a first-year school psychologist. The article has been updated to reflect that.

Will Jarvis is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @willyfrederick, or email him at will.jarvis@chronicle.com.