Active Shooter Drills Ramp Up

Ask your high schooler how his or her day was, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get a brief snapshot — classes, friends, maybe sports or club activities after school.

But have you heard, “Oh, today we had an ALICE drill”?

“I can’t picture doing it in real life — antagonizing a shooter. But I would fight to survive if he was on me.”

An ALICE drill is training for students on how to respond if there is an active shooter on school grounds or in the building itself. The training is designed for students of all grades, but it is tailored to age. And it’s quite the controversy among those in the school safety community.

ALICE stands for Alert-Lockdown-Inform-Counter-Evacuate and has similarities to conventional school safety programs that contain alerts, lockdowns, and evacuation plans in the event of a shooter.

It takes a sharp turn, however, with the “counter” part of the acronym. “Counter” measures teach kids to throw water bottles, staplers, even canned goods at an active shooter in order to “distract” or “confuse” him if the child is unable to run away or hide in a secure location.

According to the ALICE training website, it is “a last-resort effort aimed at preventing an intruder from shooting accurately.”

The ALICE program is used in about 2,000 public school districts in the U.S. More than 22 million people have received the training, its founder Greg Crane, a former SWAT team leader, claims.

However, “I like to say that parents don’t know what they don’t know,” Ken Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services, told LifeZette. “This ALICE program is being soft-pedaled as ‘enhanced lock-down drills,’ when really they are teaching kids to attack an active shooter.”

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“We are not teaching kids to attack anyone,” Crane, the former SWAT team leaer, told LifeZette. “We are not creating ninjas here. We are giving kids the tools to not attack, but survive, an armed shooter situation.”

A high school junior at a school in Massachusetts that uses the ALICE program described the training drills to LifeZette.

“In the drills, we throw things at an attacker — water bottles, pencils, anything we can grab. But what if he (the attacker) gets even madder? I can’t picture doing it in real life — antagonizing a shooter. But I would fight to survive if he was on me.”

Vice President Joe Biden supports training techniques similar to ALICE. In June 2013, he helped release new federal school training guidelines, knows as Run-Hide-Fight, through the U.S. Department of Education.

“These new federal recommendations are testimony that we’ve been doing things right for the last eight years,” said Crane on the ALICE website. “They’ve touched on every aspect of ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate). We were the first training program in the country that provided response options when a shooter gained entry into a classroom — other than sit there.”

“You need options. You can’t just lay down in a fetal position and die.”

Crane wants to empower kids to make more life-and-death decisions in any school attack, with drills that use items such as tennis balls, under the theory that shooters can’t help but be confused by multiple flying objects.

Trump vehemently disagreed. “We should be looking at training adults, not kids,” he told LifeZette. “We need to protect kids, not give them this type of unrealistic pressure — stopping an active shooter.”

He emphasized the importance of locked doors. “If a door cannot be breached, a shooter can’t get in. Let’s put the emphasis on those things,” he said.

“I am all for reasonable diversifications to existing standards in safety protocol,” Trump added. “But some things work, and always will. Even the Sandy Hook shooter bypassed rooms in lock-down. If a room can’t be accessed, the people inside are safe, without all these unknown and potentially disastrous things ALICE throws in. Let’s put our energies into those things that are 100-percent guaranteed to work.”

Others say safety protocols have to adapt to a culture and society that is more vulnerable today. The thought of encountering an armed intruder and fighting back as a last resort “isn’t in the mindset of the education culture,” Paul Fennewald, director of the Missouri Center for Educational Safety told the Kansas City Star.

Ken Trump called for strengthening traditional safety and emergency protocols, and leaving any attack maneuvers to professionals.

“But you look at where we are as a society now, you’ve got to get your mind around it,” Fennewald said. “You need options. You can’t just lay down in a fetal position and die.”

“This ALICE program is a paid program – they make money off it,” Trump, of the National School Safety and Security Services, told LifeZette. “Similar to Homeland Security’s Run-Hide-Fight program, which is the hastily conceived brainchild of the federal government, ALICE capitalizes on parents’ fears and emotions, then proceeds to not disclose everything they are putting the kids through. If it’s so good, why don’t parents know the details?”

One of Trump’s biggest concerns is the typical make-up of a classroom.

“In an ALICE scenario, a roomful of different kids — special needs kids, perhaps, or those with mental or emotional difficulties or hearing and vision deficits — they are supposed to work together and distract or attack a gunman by throwing water bottles at him?” he asked incredulously. “It does not work in reality.”

“We are training kids to say, ‘What gives me the best chance to survive?’”

Interestingly, insurance claims filed by those injured during ALICE training are rising. After more than $300,000 worth of emergency room medical bills resulting from active-shooter training was paid by an insurance company in Iowa, the Iowa Department of Homeland Security defunded ALICE training, according to Safe Havens International, a nonprofit campus safety organization.

Several communities are also dropping the ALICE training — including Crane’s own hometown of Burleson, Texas. Some parents initially supported it, but more revolted against the plan and the superintendent eventually discontinued it, according to NPR.org.

Trump called for strengthening traditional safety and emergency protocols, and leaving any attack maneuvers to professionals.

“I don’t think kids or teachers will become experts on close combat after a couple of short training sessions — that is absurd. Do cops and military professionals train that way? Absolutely not,” he told LifeZette.

“We are training kids to say, ‘What gives me the best chance to survive?’ and teaching all possible responses — running and hiding, as well as distraction techniques,” Crane said in rebuttal. “This is a post-Columbine world.”

“This training supposedly gives kids options,” Trump said. “Parents should know what their kid is being taught about safety in the worst situations. I urge parents to choose an option — encourage your school district to opt out of ALICE.”