Yep, and I thought is was weird then. If I was a seven year old I don’t think switching the playground around with the school would make me feel any safer. It seems to have worked okay for them.
I hope you are wrong, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. All those angry friends and relatives and the police giving wrong answers or no answers is a pot waiting to boil over.
I’d forgotten that. I do think it’s a good idea.
That’s one of those where I started to chuckle and then my mind said" wait a second, that’s true!"
Thanks, I can picture that. Seems like an easy solution too.
I don’t think I’ve seen actual police, but I’ve seen this group in New York hospitals. Their power only works on hospital grounds, NYPD would do any investigation that came up.
In active shooter training we did at my hospital, they told us that medical shootings tend to be different. Unlike the more opportunistic shooter of a school or a church, a medical shooter may have a specific target. The surgeon the botched my surgery, the nurse that killed my mother…and anybody that gets in my way. This kind of thing.
My point being that rushing the shooter may not have as much of an effect in a medial shooting than it does for someone whose plan is to go until they run out of targets or bullets.
For the record:
I have no longer any doubt that the person(s) on the scene first, that took charge of the situation had no business inserting themselves into something like this. This was not (IMHO) a case of limited flexibility of the “doctrine” but clearly about complete incompetence and obstinate reluctance to release control where he/they did not have any. I apologise to anyone I discussed this with, clearly they had a better picture of the events than I had.
I failed to grasp that the first responder (who I wanted to cut some slack) was the same person who was the “guy in charge” immediately after the first response. Clearly he had no business trying to control/coordinate the situation from that hallway.
My daughter is a nurse. She worked in a hospital in Virginia that was “in a bad area”. They had a police substation within their building. There was excitement most nights.
Now she is back in western Pennsylvania and they have security, a guy who sleeps most nights.
All our doors used to have that, but they switched them all to keyed about a decade ago. The reason given to me by a custodian was that teachers and admin didn’t like having to carry around yet another key, that wasn’t key-shaped and got caught on stuff in your pocket/purse.
I’m sure the best response varies with the situation. I don’t know, nor does anyone really know what was the best way to handle the situation in Uvalde, but that doesn’t mean the police should not have standard procedures to use either. It’s not clear who actually understood the policy of advancing toward the shooter in this case but it was the strategy that was intended to be put in use.
It’s interesting how much the world changed. Not long after this shooting occurred in late 1994 I was working at hospital offices in next door to the clinics. The whole area was becoming the a hospital/medical center zone. These were the days before Columbine and so many more mass shootings and there was very little done to prepare for future violence. Security has beefed up a lot since those days, much to do with 9/11 and later the Boston Marathon bombing, but at that time there wasn’t that much change to the procedures.
Eh, not really. Even in an idyllic world where we didn’t need locks on classroom doors at all, a bathroom in an elementary-school classroom would still be a very good idea. The teacher will escort the whole class to the bathrooms a few times a day, but many kids will need to go more often than that. Having a bathroom connected directly to the room vastly decreases the amount of disruption.
Yeah, my elementary school, built in the 1960s, with a bomb shelter in the basement, had bathrooms directly accessible from the kindergarten room. Very convenient. It also had a door directly from the kindergarten to the outside (I assume because in an emergency you want to be able to get the kindergarteners out immediately, and you can’t trust them to stick together in the hallways).
Same thing where I went, except the portion of the school with the kindergarten was built in the mid 50s. I think the separate entrance was for overall convenience. The kindergarteners didn’t mix with the older kids during school at all. We came and left from the separate entrance. The only time we were around the other kids was before school started out in the yard. Then the bell would ring and all the other students would head for the front door and we would go in the special side entrance.
My elementary school was built in 1926, and it had two toilet cubicles in the kindergarten classroom in an alcove in the back. The fixtures were tiny sized. For the other grades (1-8), there were bathrooms for each sex with multiple stalls on both floors.
