As students were enjoying their last day of winter break on January 4th, the teachers were experiencing active school shooter training.

To start off the day of training, teachers from all over the district had guest speakers, including a retired police officer, come and talk to them before beginning interactive training. 

“They gave a lot of examples from other schools of what would go wrong without training,” Matt Mayeske said. “They talked about different university shootings that have happened on campuses and how those went down and how we can learn from them. And then they really gave us the evidence of why it’s important that we, as like teachers, should be trained.”

Along with talking through how other shootings have gone, they also went over different survival strategies that could be helpful if something were to ever happen. 

“The second part was we went, we divided into groups and the groups went into individual classrooms and the instructor gave real and practical ways to keep yourself safe in the event of a lockdown inside of a classroom,” Frank Bell said.

This helped a lot of teachers get a better understanding of how they would react in their building and in their surroundings. 

“They taught us some things that I hadn’t even thought of and they taught us how to work with the classrooms in our specific building,” Katherine Beckley said. “And like these teachers, we care about our students…They used my classroom and so in my classroom, like wow this could actually happen.” 

Doing this training also brought on a lot of emotions for many of the teachers. 

“I think what makes me kind of concerned and sad is just that, like the reality of this is still real. Like it’s good that we have this training but it also makes me very sad that we have to live in a world where we have to do this,” Mayeske said. 

While it is unfortunate that the training is needed, many see it as a necessary thing.

“We need to have training, we need to know what to do, if it does happen, we know how to respond correctly to keep the majority of our kids as safe as possible,” Beckley said.

Everyone who took part in this training had an opportunity to send feedback to the district office.

“So, and I think they’re taking all that in and under consideration. We already have a crisis manual, we already have strategies in place that are there to keep us safe. So but I think a good thing is that it opened up dialogue of maybe some other things that the district could consider that we start doing,” Bell said. 

The district is coming up with plans for the best ways to deal with this issue. 

“We prepare for the worst, but we’re hoping for the best,” Beckley said.