While students were off enjoying Monday’s President’s Day holiday, East Tallahatchie School District personnel were being schooled on how to react in an active shooter situation on campus.
The two-hour in-service training session, held in the Morgan Freeman Auditorium at Charleston High School, was attended by several hundred district teachers, administrators, support staff and guests from the community.
Jim Brinson, director of operations for the Mississippi Office of Homeland Security, was the first of two official presenters at the event.
Brinson captured the crowd’s attention from the start, showing graphic surveillance video footage, complete with audio, from the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, in which two gunmen killed 12 students and a teacher during a shooting rampage inside the school.
“Doesn’t that make you angry?” he asked onlookers when the video ended. “It makes me angry! These people are killers. You don’t negotiate with them. You can’t negotiate with them. They have one purpose in mind, and that is to kill as many people as they can.”
The Department of Homeland Security presentation, titled “Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events,” featured several video clips, slides and other instructional aids aimed at raising awareness, prompting thought and offering practical advice.
“The Columbine clip is just one example of how it could happen anytime, anywhere,” said Laura Fosselman, active shooting coordinator with the Mississippi Law Enforcement Officers’ Training Academy in Pearl, which certifies state law enforcement officers and also facilitates specialized training courses for first responders.
One of those classes teaches tactics for isolating, distracting and neutralizing an active shooter and is designed to help lawmen and other emergency response personnel be better prepared to deal with such a scenario in the field.
Last fall, utilizing grant funds from the Mississippi Office of Homeland Security, the civilian training component was introduced.
Fosselman and the academy help to coordinate the educational program. She said there are over 70 instructors throughout the state providing the civilian training.
“This is strictly information,” noted Fosselman. “It’s a great program on awareness. When you walk into a restaurant, into a store, into your classroom, be aware of your surroundings. Know where the exits are. It’s just a matter of preparedness.”
Fosselman said the civilian program has been presented in businesses, churches and schools, but Monday’s class in Charleston was the largest that she personally has helped to coordinate.
“This is one venue that we’re going to actually use as an example to reach out to all school districts within the state to do the training,” she explained.
Chad Callender, school safety administrator for the Mississippi Department of Education, attended Monday’s presentation at CHS and said he, too, would like to see other school systems share the program with their staff members.
“This presentation allows, rather than just the upper echelon ... the teachers and all the staff within the district, and the schools themselves, to have an idea and to give them some guidance,” Callender said.
“It gives some training for them to have and to see real life events and for them to question, ‘Well, what would I do?’ Or place those scenarios in their school,” Callender continued. “When that adrenaline dumps, our body generally goes back to training.”
Jerry “Bubba” Williams II, ETSD school resource officer — a position that gives him certain oversight of safety and security matters — said the district has a crisis management plan with which each employee is supposed to familiarize themselves. The schools also periodically conduct lockdown, fire and tornado drills to test the plan and its execution by staff.
“We have been successful in our drills,” he said. “We’ve had some bumps in the road, but, overall, I’m pleased.”
Still, Williams believed that the staff could benefit from more training, especially an active shooter response class.
“The staff here has the potential to save more lives than first responders, because they’re here already,” noted Williams.
It was his reaching out to Tallahatchie County Emergency Management Director Thad Roberts about the availability of training courses that led to the connection with Fosselman.
Williams said the training is important, even in little Charleston, Mississippi, where an attempted mass murder — the definition of an active shooting — might seem unfathomable.
Not to Williams.
“It’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when it’s going to happen, in my opinion,” Williams noted. “It’s happening everywhere.”
ETSD Superintendent Ben Kennedy said he welcomed the training, adding, “We are always working hard to ensure the safety of everyone on our campuses.”
While safety at school might have been paramount on the minds of those attending Monday’s session, and school shootings always garner some of the biggest media coverage because children are involved, one of the slides during Brinson’s presentation illustrated that of the 179 active shooter events charted in the United States from 2000 to 2014, over 50 percent of the attacks involved commerce — places of business — and about 25 percent were education related.
In recent years, mass shootings have occurred in churches, malls, nightclubs and in other venues.
Fosselman said the Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events class is worthwhile for any group, any organization.
“Any law enforcement agency, any company, any church, can get this training complimentary because of the Mississippi Office of Homeland Security grant,” explained Fosselman.
For more information, contact Fosselman at 601-933-2126 or email her at lfosselmanatdps.ms.gov.
IN THE PHOTO: Jim Brinson (right), director of operations for the Mississippi Office of Homeland Security, uses slides to teach Charleston school officials how to react in the event of an active shooter crisis on campus. (Photo by Clay McFerrin)
