Page 104 - Security Today, April 2018

VIRTUAL TRAINING
comes. Bob Walker, a project manager, told the AP that “once you hear the children, the screaming, it makes it very, very real.”
CHOOSING A SCENARIO
The program has the ability to mimic several different scenarios, including simulating a student shooter or an adult. The trainee can also choose to react as a teacher, administrator or student.
Griffith said that the program designers listened to real dispatch tapes from past school shootings to really understand the confusion and chaos that goes along with active shooter situations. They also spoke with the mother of a child killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. She helped to walk program designers through each step of that tragic day.
“It gives you chills when you think about what’s happening on those tapes,” Griffith said. “It tore us apart to listen to her and what she went through.”
The real-life tapes and stories from those who experienced these frightening situations first-hand served as a motivator for program designers. In order to complete their main goal of training educators to save lives when an armed attacker bursts into a school, you have to check your emotions at the door and know it is all for a good cause.
The school shooting simulation is currently being housed at the
University of Central Florida in Orlando, and is set to officially launch in the spring, but it isn’t the only simulation DHS is rolling out.
In addition to the school shooter EDGE program, DHS has launched an active shooter scenario involving a 26-story hotel that includes numerous possible environments for first responder training: a confer- ence center, a restaurant, or office spaces. As many as 60 people can train on the program at once and can be located anywhere in the simulation.
“It’s important that this provides agencies like fire and law enforce- ment an opportunity to train together,” Milt Nenneman, Homeland Security Science and Technology First Responder Group program manager, said in a recent Justice Department article. “Very seldom do they have the opportunity to train together in real-life, and it is hard to get those agencies time away from their regular duties.”
The main criticism in school safety and security is that schools wait for a tragedy to strike before changing security measures, creating pro- tocols and talking about student safety. This new
program could be the proactive training needed to
keep campuses across the country safer in the face
of an active shooter.
Sydny Shepard is the Executive Editor of Campus Security & Life Safety.
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