TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — A COVID compromised school year is over and it won’t be long before a new school year begins---with students and teachers back in class. Now, Pima County Sheriff’s deputies are working to prepare schools for school shooters.
What seems like a normal music class soon takes on an ominous tone.
A student appears with a gun. First he threatens to shoot himself, then points the gun at the teacher.
It’s a training scenario.
The teacher tries to talk down the student but that delays the first step of the three word lesson for surviving a shooting----Run, hide, fight.
Run if you can.
Hide if there’s no place to run.
Fight if there’s no escape or there’s a chance to slow or stop the threat.
In another simulation, educators clear the room right away.
In a debriefing the educator tells a deputy: “It just seemed like the run option was the best at that point. Obviously we can’t hide in the room and I wasn’t going to fight because the student was way away from us.”
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has staged these scenarios at Sunnyside’s Desert View High School but teachers from a wide range of districts have come for the training.
Sunnyside School Security Director Ryan Powell spent 20 years as a Sheriff’s Deputy. He says with in-person classes resuming this fall it’s time for a reminder school shootings can happen anywhere---and it’s time for a life-saving refresher.
“Having this kind of training is going to sharpen those tools and sharpen those skills and get more real and say this is, this is something that maybe we forgot”
Student Katrina Quijava says training like this is so important she’s volunteered two years in a row.
She wants to be ready to help herself and help others----and in the training she finds hope.
“I think there is hope for survival. Just kind of 100% and do the best you can do that's all you really can.”
