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School districts need to do more to protect students

By Bob Renzi 4 min read

As another school year is beginning, school districts have been publishing about their recent changes over the summer to ensure that their schools are safer.

A recent article in a local newspaper listed many of the changes taking place in Franklin-Regional, Latrobe, Laurel Highlands, Derry, Penn-Trafford, Mount Pleasant, Yough, and Hempfield school districts.

Districts are taking more steps to ensure the safety of all of their staff and students.

Most of the changes, however, were devoted to more cameras, more electronic surveillance equipment, and more school resource officers. All of those changes, are important, and will increase to a degree, the safety of the schools. But none of them will stop, immediately, a dangerous threat, such a an active shooter, who has no regard for life, especially his own.

Cameras, locked doors, and a police officer in one part of a building, cannot secure the entire school building. Plus, none of these measures, will protect anyone who is outside of the building, which is where about 20 percent of incidents have occurred.

Also only about 10 percent of the incidents involved forcible entry from the outside. Locked doors and security people at the front entrance will not stop someone from entering via a side entrance just by busting open glass doors. Most the shooters were students who entered routinely in the morning with weapons stashed in backbacks, coats, or previously stashed ahead of time.

Your first responders, have been, and will always be the students and staff in the immediate area of the threat. An armed policeman is useless if someone starts shooting in a cafeteria in the midst of hundreds of students, or in a crowded hallway, or filled auditorium, or stands up in the middle of a classroom and starts shooting.

The incident is usually over by the time emergency help gets there. Our schools are not prepared to stop any of these incidents. Your only solution is to train students and staff to work together to end the threat as quickly as possible. To say that no one will be hurt is absurd. But I can guarantee you, whether it be at school, home, or on the streets, if you do nothing, you have no chance of surviving. The method of counterattack is different for secondary and older students, as compared to elementary and younger students, who are more dependent on teacher response.

Hempfield Area school officials stated in the newspaper article that they are going to set up training in the spring to train faculty and staff to physically respond to a threat. Let’s just hope that nothing happens until spring. Schools use “denial” to deal with these active shooter threats. Denial is not an option, and neither is hope.

I don’t know why they refuse to train the students, who are the major targets and victims, to fight back. They are by far, the most physically equipped to handle these situations, with the right training. Also, this training is not just for school environments. It is something they can use for the rest of their lives to protect themselves and their own families. There are going to be lawsuits whether people are active or passive during an event. And it is guaranteed that there will more lawsuits involved if everyone remains passive.

California, Albert Gallatin, and Connellsville school districts, are the only local districts, along with Menallen Elementary School, to have been trained in the ALICE program. ALICE represents alert, lockdown, inform, counter, and evacuate. All of these districts have been very pleased with the training provided.

The sad part is that many districts won’t even listen to a description of the training I provide. Jim Duncan, a school board director in Connellsville, stated recently that the number one priority in our schools should be the safety of our students, not the PSSA scores. Without keeping our students as safe as possible, PSSA scores are meaningless.

School districts need stop trying to just prevent critical incidents only, and begin to also train everyone on how to actively deal with the incident. It is now up to the parents, students, and teachers, to demand that everyone is properly trained to better handle these critical incidents.

The Franklin Regional stabbings last year opened up many eyes as to how vulnerable our schools are. Please keep your eyes open.

Bob Renzi is a resident of Connellsville. He is an ALICE instructor.

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