District partners with local agencies to hold active shooter tabletop exercise

Apr. 20—As the United States has opened back up, mass shootings have begun to take place again — there have been about four across the country since Friday.

Junction City is not immune to this phenomenon and neither is Unified School District 475.

USD 475 held an active shooter exercise last week in conjunction with the Junction City Fire Department, the Geary County Sheriff's Office and the Junction City Police Department in the hopes of preparing for the worst so if a shooting takes place in a district school they will be prepared.

According to USD 475 COO David Wild, the district held a tabletop exercise with local law enforcement and the fire department to talk through the procedures that would be implemented if a shooting were to take place in the district. The exercise helped "reestablish some processes" that had been put by the wayside during COVID-19.

"We haven't been able to do a robust, actual exercise that we typically do in the district where our emergency responder partners are also with us through those exercises," Wild said.

The tabletop exercise was "an intellectual and verbal" one and during the coming fall semester the district and its partners may embark on more hands-on exercises.

Sheriff Dan Jackson said the exercise was a step toward making the district's students that much more safe.

"At the end of the day, all we all are worried about is keeping our kids safe," Jackson said. "We're never going to be as strong as the Sheriff's Office as we are strong when we partner with the school district, partner with the police department, partner with the fire department. You're always much more (as) partners than you are by yourself."

Junction City Police Chief John Lamb said such exercises are vital to spot deficiencies in the district's plan for dealing with active shooters.

"As we've seen from past events, we learn from those events and we retool ourselves — we rethink — and identify deficiencies and we start the communications to address them so that in the event a situation does happen we have an idea what everybody is doing," he said. "Emergency management, fire department, school board, the Sheriff's Office, (the JCPD). Depending on where it is, it very well may be in the county and we're going to respond as a secondary. It may be in the city whereas everybody's coming to us. So I think those lines of communication need to be kept open and we need to start articulating what we're going to do. So this is a valuable exercise."

Wild and Lamb both said the exercise helped them recognize potential areas for improvement in the district's plan.

"Policy only goes so far," Lamb said. "Practice is what really — it's where the rubber meets the road."

He said there would be a smaller tabletop exercise to address the deficiencies the first exercise identified in the district's plan.

"We have takeaways," Lamb said. "Things that we'd like to address — to better define — we want to improve upon. Myself being from Florida, I piggyback a lot of the information from Marjory Stoneman Douglas incident and a lot of things that the State of Florida enacted — I'd love to see some of those processes, procedures implemented here."

In addition to local training exercises, the district has also sent officials out of state for training.

According to Wild, USD 475's Director of Emergency Management Scott Clark has gone to Littleton, Colorado on multiple occasions "to go through their processes and their protocols."

Littleton is the site of the Columbine High School massacre where two students killed 13 of their classmates in a mass shooting April 20, 1999.

"We recognize their unfortunate experience has driven them to be one of the best school districts — in our opinion — in the nation that knows exactly how to handle these things to the best of our ability," Wild said. "We've taken lesson learned from them and implemented (those lessons) here for USD 475."

The district utilizes a system called ALICE — ac active shooter training program.

"It is decision-based," Wild said. "You may have heard similar programs referred to as run, hide, fight. But what we do is try to instill in our teaching staff, our administrative staff — even down to the student — you have options. In the event there's a crisis, you have options — and we hope to establish enough muscle memory through drills that those staff and students recognize that I've got an option here. I can either escape, I can lockdown and barricade in this classroom or I can, if I'm confronted with something — we train our students for instance if an assailant were to walk in this room right now, we're all captured in this room — everybody picks something up and throws it at that individual and then as many as can escape because we all understand if you've got an assailant with that much stimulus coming at him or her — they're going to flinch. That is just a natural human reaction. (ALICE) is a decision, option-based program, very flexible, empowers every individual to hopefully make the right decisions in the case of an actual event."