Just over a week ago, as a crew of roofers worked on the outside of the school, a team of police officers, volunteers, school staff and trainers set up inside and practiced how they’d respond to an active shooter.
It was a tense, noisy environment. Volunteers yelled for help, another repeated “lockdown, lockdown, lockdown,” over the intercom as they ran through the building. The man acting as the shooter shouted and fired – with simulated live rounds – at officers when they came around corners.
At one point, officer Max Jusi sprinted through a room with children screaming in one corner to get to a small, windowless office where the shooter lay prone on the floor. Sirens blared in the background. His radio chirped insistently.
Red-faced and out of breath, Jusi knelt to handcuff the shooter, and took three deep, even breaths as he clipped them on before exhaling one long breath then leaving to find his partner and care for the people scattered throughout the school.
“Are you with me?” he asked as he looked up at Sergeant Michael Fullerton, his partner in the drill.
Suddenly trainer Kyle Morgan stepped in from the corner where he watched the scene play out. “Just say ‘give me one.’
“Give me one,” Jusi repeated as he and Fullerton stood side by side and worked their way methodically through the school, rescuing bystanders – some who could walk on their own and others who had injuries that needed emergency care.
Each step of the way Morgan coached the officers to remember to talk to each other, communicate about what they’re doing and help the people they’re rescuing make sense of the situation.
“You’ve got to give them something to do,” Morgan told Jusi as the officer herded a small group of people into a classroom to get them out of harm’s way.
“Lock the door!” Jusi instructed them.
Morgan, an Army veteran, refers to the training as the “protector mindset,” and there’s a focus on mindfulness – especially in an overstimulating environment.
“So, learning how to safeguard your bandwidth,” Morgan said. “Because then they’ll see like … ‘hey this bit of my kit was flying around everywhere.’ It’s something as simple as that to something like noticing their fitness right? Like, are they actually prepared, you know, to close distances and things like that.”
Jusi said he was grateful for all of the training but specifically the breathwork is something he can see himself using at home or when he’s not at work.
“All of it has been great,” he said.
Haines police spent three days with Morgan’s training team, a company called Blu Bearing Solutions. In addition to mindfulness, they also worked on shooting and being accountable for every bullet they fired and on communicating frequently with each other – particularly in high-stress environments.
“Over-communicating in these environments is huge,” Morgan said. “It lets the shooter know that you’re coming to get them. It also really reassures people that ‘hey man, this is coming to an end.’”
The focus is on simple, repetitive phrases that help officers move in tandem with each other.
“Communication is so, so huge, because in fight, flight, or freeze, little things become more difficult,” Morgan said. “So, being concise. Because, you’re going to try to have elaborate conversations with people and it’s going to come out [jumbled].”
Police Chief Josh Dryden said one key takeaway for him was that Haines police need to spend more time training together – especially because these kinds of skills will be lost if they are not practiced regularly.
But also, because there are some unique challenges to responding to an active shooter situation or, really, any situation in the Chilkat Valley.
And, Alaskans have a do-it-yourself mentality that could complicate things.
“Half of Haines is going to show up with guns to help out,” he said. “I would do that if my kid was in the school. I would listen to the officers on scene, but I’d be ready to jump right in and help.”
“I think that it was a good shakeup of our kit and our gear,” he said. “It knocked the complacency dust off everybody and gave us a good kick in the butt, a good reset.”
Dryden said the training, which cost about $17,000, will be paid for by the Alaska Police Standards Council.
“It cost a lot of money, but I got pre-approval,” he said.
Haines School Principal Lilly Boron volunteered to help with the simulation. She said this was the first time she had been involved with a training where police move throughout the entire building.
It’s an experience Boron said she appreciated because when she thinks of an active shooter or a similarly dangerous situation at the school, she has a different perspective than the police. And, it’s helpful to think through each step.
“The police want to contain the shooter, help people and make the scene safe,” she said. “But in my mind, … I was going, what about the parents that are walking up to the front of the school building? What about the parents that are terrified for their children? And so how do we disseminate that information? How do we communicate from room to room, and do we have those channels of communication?”
Boron acknowledged that training to handle a violent person in the school is stressful. But she sees it as necessary and, in a way, an extension of her role as a parent.
“When my girls were first born, I think I spent half of every waking day imagining the horrible things that could happen to them. And, truthfully, I think about that every day at school,” she said. “So this isn’t traumatizing to me. This is like my maternal instinct kicking in and saying ‘OK, we need to make sure this is safe.”
Boron said she wanted residents of the Chilkat Valley to understand that an active shooter situation could happen at any time and the more prepared law enforcement, emergency responders, and school officials can be – the safer they will be.
“You don’t want the drill to be more traumatizing than the actual event, but it’s the reality that we deal with,” she said. “And I woke up this morning and thought, I’m a school principal and I’m going to the school to prepare for the possibility of a school shooter. And, it’s a weird place to be in, but I think we have to acknowledge it.”