Empowering students is key to school safety plan

Fire and tornado drills used to be the extent of school safety training.

Today, students in the Port Washington-Saukville School District, like their peers throughout the country,  train for the once-unthinkable, now fact-of-life scenario of armed assailants in schools, like the scenes that played out in Waukesha and Oshkosh schools last week and coincided with threats that crippled at least eight other Wisconsin school districts with fear.  

In response to those incidents, Supt. Michael Weber sent a rare, district-wide phone message to parents last week informing them that administrators had reviewed safety training and procedures and plan to meet with area police officials to “look for ways to do even more to increase our security.”

The district-wide school safety committee, whose members include the chiefs of the Port Washington and Saukville police and fire departments as well as school administrators and board members, is scheduled to meet next week.

“Unfortunately, this is the world we live in,” said Saukville Elementary School Principal Chad Brakke, who teaches the district’s youngest students what to do if an attacker is in or around their school.

The district has made physical security improvements to its schools, all of which have double-locked-door vestibule entrances. Some schools have shatter-resistant coatings on windows near main entrances and there are surveillance cameras throughout Port Washington High School and Thomas Jefferson Middle School. In addition, there is a regular police presence at  both schools, particularly at the high school during classes and some athletic events.

But key to the district’s safety measures is the training staff members and students undergo to prepare for an assailant in their schools.

While schools once taught students to essentially hide in their classrooms from gunmen, the district adopted the nationally recognized ALICE active shooter training model last year.

An acronym that stands for the various measures that can be taken in active shooter situations, ALICE teaches students and staff members responses that include barricading themselves in classrooms, running from their schools and countering attacks by, for instance, throwing objects at a gunman to distract him.

The high school has already conducted two ALICE drills this school year during which students and staff members ran from the school to various “rally points” in the city and locked down in classrooms.

On Monday, the school practiced a “soft lockdown” that would be done if there was a gunman in the city but not in a school.

The school has three more ALICE drills planned for the school year.

Thad Gabrielse, Port High’s athletic director and an assistant principal who also serves as the district’s school safety coordinator, said he drafts a lesson plan for each training exercise that engages students in discussions about responses to school shooters.

“It’s like a classroom activity,” Gabrielse said. “The kids have the opportunity to share their thoughts about what they would do in a certain scenario.”

The key to the ALICE training is that it gives students and staff members the power to think for themselves in crisis situations with the realization that while the best course of action may be barricading classrooms in one part of the school, running from a gunman could be the right response in another part of the building, Gabrielse said.

“Kids ask, ‘Are you sure I can just break a window and climb out?’” he said. 

“I think we have done a lot to improve school safety by educating and empowering students and staff members. We’ve put the power in the hands of teachers and students to do what they need to do to survive.”

Even the youngest students in the district are trained how to react to an assailant in or around their schools through a modified ALICE program.

While training at elementary schools varies by grade level, all students are eventually taught how to lockdown in their classrooms and evacuate the building and gather at a predetermined location, Brakke said. 

Just as it is at the middle and high school, giving elementary school students options for responding to a crisis is important, Brakke said. 

“Anytime you talk about something like this with young kids, you get a million what-ifs,” he said. 

When students were taught to simply hide in their classrooms, teachers had to side-step those questions and assure them they would be safe, Brakke said.

“Even the kids knew we weren’t being entirely honest with them,” he said. “Now we can say, ‘OK, what if that was the situation?’ Now I can say, here’s what you could do if, for instance, you were trapped in a classroom.

“These conversations are very productive even for elementary school students. Empowering them to make their own decisions is really important.”

Brakke said the training and other safety measures that at one time may have been considered draconian have been well received by parents as society has come to grips with the reality of school shootings.

“I remember 10 years ago the fear and concern expressed by parents when we began locking the doors to school,” he said. “They said, ‘You’re turning our children’s elementary school into a prison.’

“Now they’re glad we’ve taken the steps we have.”

Security measures are constantly reviewed both at the school and district level by administrators and police officers and will be scrutinized again in light of last week’s incidents at Wisconsin schools during the meeting of the district-wide school safety committee next week.

“Are there additional safety measures we could implement? I don’t think you’re ever done analyzing what you can do to ensure the safety of your students and staff members,” Weber said.

On the table is everything from additional training to physical security improvements at schools.

“We had someone just ask if we’ve considered having metal detectors in school,” Gabrielse said. “That’s a really costly proposition, but we continue to look at things like that because you can’t put a price on safety. 

“Maybe someday we’ll see metal detectors in our schools.”

But, Gabrielse said, administrators are sensitive to the fine line between safe schools and hyper-secure buildings that breed fear and can interfere with the primary mission of schools. 

“When students and others come into our schools, we want them to come into inviting places of learning,” he said. “We have an environment in our schools now where students and staff members feel safe even when they see things happening at other schools.”