The Kosciusko Police Department held an active shooter drill at Kosciusko High School Friday morning in an effort to keep officers, school leadership and students ready should a real-life situation arise at the school
School Resource Officer Mark Gilmore schedules and coordinates periodic drills at the schools.
“It is for them, but it is also for us,” said Police chief Herbert Dew. “If you don’t use (the skills) regularly, you forget. You can never train enough for this.”
Dew, who played one of two “bad guys” in the scenario, said the department is especially aware of safety during drills at schools.
“The safety issue involved when we do a drill is that we don’t have live weapons in the school. We take every safety precaution we can,” he said.
A message went out to parents to ensure they would be aware that the “incident” was only a drill.
“Luckily, we didn’t have any parents show up,” he said, partially due to the fact that the department did not use its normal live communications systems during the episode.
Students were not utilized in the scenario other than their acting as they normally would in such a situation. Dew said, however, that if students had happened to be in the hallways were the mock incident took place, they may have been drawn into the incident.
“There were no students walking in the halls when the episode started, but had there been, we probably would have utilized that and tried to pull some of them into the scenario,” said the Chief.
Five adults in the building were invovled in the scenario, but the rest of staff and students knew nothing other than that a drill was going to be run on Friday.
Seven Kosciusko Police officers responded to the incident. They were broken into two groups, as they would be in a live incident.
First, there is a contact team, whose job it is to “come into the scenario and get the bad guy,” said Dew.
Next, there is a rescue team that enters the situation only after the contact team has rendered the situation “safe.”
In this incident, there were the two “bad guys” as well as one mock casualty and one mock injury.
Asked what the department and school officials learned from the drill, Dew said those invovled have not yet had their debriefing meeting during which they watch video of the incident and response and discuss ways in which response can be improved going forward.
Dew said the department will continue to hold active shooter drills in the schools and other public spaces as Gilmore sets them up.
“It’s not a big deal for us (police) to do these. We have to be ready to go at any time,” said the Chief. “We have one job in this type of situation and that is to come in and stop the threat.”
