Teaching the Kids
I missed the “Duck and Cover” training of paranoid yesterday. Apparently, I was just a couple of years off from the redux retro-version of this classic organization of a more orderly Cold War Nuclear fall-out freakout… was there even a watered-down version during the early 80s? Whatever… my parents enjoyed it the first go-around… Bert the Turtle working to hammer a fear of Kruschev into them.
In the last two years of high school, we did have two varieties of interesting, somewhat contradictory drills. We learned that in case of a school shooting, everyone should walk en masse to the Track field. There, the principal would make a few comments about the necessity of these things, citing recent news of some kid in Idaho who nearly pulled something off. The two or three times we went through this, it was, indeed, some kid in Idaho that he referenced — why some kid in Idaho, I do not know, nor do I know if there really was some kid in Idaho.
The other procedure? We practiced school lockdowns… generally if I wasn’t told that the school had been locked down, I can’t say that I’d notice, but I guess it’s good to know that in case of emergency, if the school authorities don’t decide that we run en masse over to the track field, everyone’s safely in the classroom while my nutso peer is running around in the hallway with a sawed off shotgun… ready for the security guard to tackle, I suppose.
I’m going to have to think hard into the past to figure out if any of my schools implemented a drill in case of gang violence. The tide of gang – presence in the public schools (or, better to say — wannabe gangs) ebbed dramatically in the middle 90s.
The watershed moment that posited the next formation of school drills came when that kid flew an airplane into a skyscraper down in Florida… impressionable kid, he. Bill Maher posited that at the time that if this were three years ago, he’d be seeking to shoot his students… and he’s right. That fad is over. Media space has moved on completely to other … things.
These are the days where we read about Russian terrorists taking hostage a batch of young students… attempting to further their cause for Chechnan Separatism.
Thus, here are the drills that are being practiced in schools these days, in small town America:
Dressed in camouflauge, helmets, bulletproof vests, and armed with special weaponry, Grandview’s Special Incident Response Team fall into stick file behind a shield and enter Harriet Thompson Elementary School to confront a parent who’s barricaded himself in a classroom full of children.
That’s how members of Grandview’s SIRT team spend their evening last Thursday — playing out several different potential scenarios while honing in on their special incidence skills.
With the assistance of Grandview Police Explorers and young Random and Kierra Fairchild, members of the special response team utilized the school as a training ground. As each scene played out, the Fairchild kids played scared victims and the Explorers took turns either playing shooters or innocent bystanders.
At least once a month, the police participate in training that helps them prepare for situations that are “outside the typical law enforcement realm” here locally, says Detective Mitch Fairchild. A subject barricaded inside of a classroom is not at all typical in the area. It falls under the umbrella of high risk special circumstances and it’s those situations that the SIRT team must practice in order to identify the team’s strenghts, as well as areas they need to work on.
I assume that the actual students of Harriet Thompson aren’t involved here. They might become a little scared.
September 7th, 2004 at 10:35 pm
in my youth, duck and cover actually proved to be rather versatile…in heavily militarized southern california, we were braced for nuclear annihilation well into the 1980’s. we also used duck and cover tactics for earthquake drills. the weird part here is that we actually had separate drills for earthquakes and nuclear holocaust (which even as a child confused me since the ducking and covering was entirely the same).
my mom teaches in NE Portland, and they use duck and cover for drive-by shootings (sadly, not always a drill), and i think they had some sort of chemical attack drill once that required everyone to go outside like a fire drill.