LIMA — “Active shooter! Active shooter in the building!”
With those frightening words, training got underway Friday morning at Heritage Elementary School as part of the first-ever districtwide training for all Lima schools employees in the ALICE method of instructing teachers and school personnel how to protect themselves and their students in the event of an armed intruder inside the school.
ALICE is an acronym for the key principals of survival in such an attack: Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate. Nate Garlock, director of safety and security for the school district, was coordinating the instruction at Heritage Elementary, with the assistance of personnel from the Lima Police Department, Allen County Sheriff’s Office and Lima Fire Department.
At first glance, the training seemed chaotic. But Garlock said that was not by accident.
“We want to make it as chaotic as possible. We’re trying to be realistic here,” Garlock said, “and we’re giving the staff the tools necessary” to survive in a life-and-death ordeal.
After Garlock’s initial warning of an active shooter in the building, staffers gathered in each of four classrooms quickly shut and locked doors to the rooms. A masked gunman then began to move from classroom to classroom, pounding on doors and demanding entry while firing “shots” from a simulated weapon.
The first exercise went fairly smoothly. “Fatalities” were kept to a minimum. As the second active-shooter scenario began, Garlock told some of the staff members who were attempting — unsuccessfully — to flee from the shooter, “That was a terrible evacuation; you’re all dead.”
He was laughing, but everyone involved realized the seriousness of the moment.
The part of the active shooter was played by Patrolman Matt Woodworth of the Lima Police Department. So much does Woodworth believe in the ALICE training that he donated his off-duty time to participate.
“For the teachers here, this is invaluable training,” Woodworth said. “I’m here today because I think it’s important to help out.”
Deputy Damian Tibbs of the Allen County Sheriff’s Office is a school resource officer for the county. He said the ALICE training “prepares students and staff on what to do in an active shooter situation. It’s important that we train them on what to do. The average response time for police in these types of situations is between four and seven minutes. The teachers need to know what to do” until police arrive.
Celeste Hoverman is a speech pathologist at the school. She called the training “very valuable.”
“You have to make it so you don’t even think about” what to do in similar situations. “Muscle memory just has to take over,” said Hoverman, “because it’s not a matter of ‘if’ something is going to happen … but ‘when.’”
Garlock said Lima schools was the first district in the state of Ohio to adopt the ALICE program when it was introduced locally nearly a decade ago. He said the lessons learned by staff during the training are applicable outside the classroom as well, in locations such as churches or office buildings.
Garlock said that later in the day Friday he would sit down with school staff “and discuss what they did and why they did it” during the training and attempt to further equip school personnel with as many tools as possible to deal with what everyone hopes is a situation they’ll never face.
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