Local schools consider teaching to fight back

Controversial training gains attention after attack

By Meg Murphy

Boston Globe 12/24/2012:  Several area school districts are interested in a controversial response to shooting rampages that trains teachers and students to act quickly to save themselves rather than hide in a locked classroom and wait for police.

Canton Police Chief Kenneth Berkowitz, a vocal supporter of the approach, said more than 10 communities have contacted him since the Dec. 14 Connecticut school shootings to learn about the response training, called ALICE, an acronym for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate.

“The old lockdown is pretty much antiquated,” said John Gagnon, a school resource officer in Hopedale, with a population about 6,000. “That whole hide-under-your-desk-and-wait is done.”

The training approach had been adopted by school officials in Canton, Hopedale, and Wilmington in the months before the Connecticut tragedy, although a junior-senior high school in Hopedale appears to be the only district to have actually trained students; it held a single practice drill this fall.

The ALICE approach has gained the support of local superintendents in Westborough and Stoughton, and has been the focus of exploratory inquiries in Concord, Franklin, North Andover, Wellesley, and Winchester. In Georgetown, the district has discussed altering its security protocol to include training staff and students in an extreme lift-threatening situation to “fight for their lives.”

“You have to counter. Like I told one high school kid, if it is not nailed down, you throw it: a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet, books, cellphones. Then, if you have the mind to, you counter and swarm.”John Gagnon, school resource officer in Hopedale

Some school districts have been studying the ALICE approach for weeks, but their interest became public only after the Connecticut shootings.

About 300 out of more than 130,000 public and private schools nationwide, or about 1.5 million students, are using ALICE, which was created more than a decade ago by Greg Crane, a former SWAT officer in Texas, following the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. The ALICE approach is marketed by Response Options, a Texas-based security firm run by Crane.

...read more here.