Teaching kids to fight back against classroom invaders

[morph4me]

I understand the point you're making, and for myself, I agree - b every time. However, as a teacher, I don't feel that it's a decision I can autocratically make for every student in my classroom. Too much depends on the age and abilities of the students, the willingness of the teacher to lead, and the situation occurring at the moment. Are too many people trained from an early age to lay down and hope for the best? Yes. But that doesn't mean it's always a bad response. You have to be willing to shift your plans according to the situation as it is occurring at the time.

As the teacher you would be in a no win situation, and would have to live with yourself, if you survived, with the consequences of whatever decision you made. In a this kind of situation, I would have to do something, realizing that I am acting alone, and would also have live with my decisions or die by them. The others in the situation would have choices to make as well, I would hope they would choose to take advantage of whatever distraction I can provide and get the hell out, but I suspect there would be those that would follow me and those that would freeze.

I speak only for myself, but I cannot assume that a person coming into a school, restraunt, place of business, public conveyance or anywhere else, with a weapon drawn, is not going to use that weapon simply because people are not moving. My number one choice is escape, always, but that isn't always an option, and waiting for someone else to do it has never been my forte.

 

[MJS]

That's the point of the drills, isn't it, for repetition, so that the kids know what they should be doing and at least have a semblance of organization. In martial arts, we drill all the time so that hopefully, we can act quickly when needed.

Yes, thats the point of drills. I guess where I was going with that was, unless there is some added 'stress' during the drill, the person doing the drill will always be in a relaxed state. Should we put the students in a burning room to get them to move faster? Probably not. Should we simulate a take over by bringing in paintball guns?

I guess this brings up some good points for discussion. How do we go about preparing the students for this? Do we set aside a certain amount of time each month and really simulate a hostage situation?

Mike

 

[exile]

Do we set aside a certain amount of time each month and really simulate a hostage situation?

Mike

Mike, I'm having a very hard time with that scenario... if you make the drills realistic enough to be even vaguely close to the reality of such situations, you are almost certainly going to have a very large number of young children waking up frequently with nightmares, and walking around fearful during the day. Kids get scared even when they're playing with each other and things start getting out of control. What is going to be going through a child's mind not just during these drills but afterward? How much fear are we willing to make our kids live with on the very off chance that a school invasion is going to happen to them and on the still more off chance that they are going to be able to take effective action against Charles Roberts IV or some other psychopathic time bomb on the basis of anything we could teach them?

If there is sufficient danger to warrant even contemplating putting millions of school children through such traumatic experiences, then to my mind, that means it's time to dig into our pockets and double the size of our police forces, with a large percentage of the extra officers assigned to protect our children in school. Is anything even remotely as important? I don't want to ask my boy to do a job that a trained LEOs, good with weapons and good with their minds, are going to be at their very limits trying to do. I'm just saying, picture it---what your child will be going through if such drills are instituted, if they are constantly reminded via these drills of what kinds of things might happen to them---with no assurance that the resulting fear will materially increase their safety. It just doesn't compute...

 

[Carol]

Do we have to go to a school SWAT team, armed teachers, and kids rushing gunmen invading classrooms?

What about ... metal detectors and backpack searches?

 

[Jonathan Randall]

Do we have to go to a school SWAT team, armed teachers, and kids rushing gunmen invading classrooms?

What about ... metal detectors and backpack searches?

Unfortunately, many, if not most, of these cases are invasions. Even Columbine was such with the killers skipping morning classes and arrving on campus already armed. Also the recent massacre of Amish students was an invasion.

I actually think that the biggest thing that could be done has been done - changing tactics from forming a perimeter and attempting negotions to a direct assault on the shooter by the first arriving officers. This has already, IIRC, saved lives.

Still, this is a hard issue with no easy answers. I do think that teaching High School students to charge pack-style a massacre shooter when escape is not possible, is good advice. It worked in a school cafeteria in the Northwest some years ago when students charged and disarmed a gunman (fellow student) as he attempted to reload.

 

[MJS]

Mike, I'm having a very hard time with that scenario... if you make the drills realistic enough to be even vaguely close to the reality of such situations, you are almost certainly going to have a very large number of young children waking up frequently with nightmares, and walking around fearful during the day. Kids get scared even when they're playing with each other and things start getting out of control. What is going to be going through a child's mind not just during these drills but afterward? How much fear are we willing to make our kids live with on the very off chance that a school invasion is going to happen to them and on the still more off chance that they are going to be able to take effective action against Charles Roberts IV or some other psychopathic time bomb on the basis of anything we could teach them?

I agree and that is why I asked in that post, how do we go about doing this type of preparation, if we're going to have kids assist in disarming the hostage taker. Its hard enough for an adult, in a stressfull situation, to remain calm, nevermind a small child. That being said, I don't think its a good idea to have kids do this.

If there is sufficient danger to warrant even contemplating putting millions of school children through such traumatic experiences, then to my mind, that means it's time to dig into our pockets and double the size of our police forces, with a large percentage of the extra officers assigned to protect our children in school. Is anything even remotely as important? I don't want to ask my boy to do a job that a trained LEOs, good with weapons and good with their minds, are going to be at their very limits trying to do. I'm just saying, picture it---what your child will be going through if such drills are instituted, if they are constantly reminded via these drills of what kinds of things might happen to them---with no assurance that the resulting fear will materially increase their safety. It just doesn't compute...

Many large schools already have Police Officers assigned to the school on a daily basis. Not only to ensure safety, but also to help educate and offer the students someone to talk to, should they have a problem.

Mike

 

[Grenadier]

My opinion: it's better to die standing, than on one's knees.

I know that it sounds harsh, but if such madmen are going to kill innocents anyways (such as Columbine, the Amish school incident), then you may as well do what you can do.




Unfortunately, it's not that easy, especially when one takes into consideration what Lisa stated. To get a bunch of children to rush an attacker is going to be a nigh-impossible task under a high stress situation. This is doubly true when that attacker is armed, since children aren't exactly combat capable, and most will probably panic when such a situation occurs.

It's even worse when the children are young.

It only gets even more difficult when we take into account the mentality of the school populace. Many a school with the ridiculous zero-tolerance indoctrination policies are going to have a bunch of children in there that will offer no resistance.

To have those kids try to become cannon fodder is probably not going to work too well, unless they've been trained. In those cases, you're going to create one headache of a policy conflict.

 

[exile]

to have kids assist in disarming the hostage taker. ...I don't think its a good idea to have kids do this.

Many large schools already have Police Officers assigned to the school on a daily basis. Not only to ensure safety, but also to help educate and offer the students someone to talk to, should they have a problem.
Mike

Mike---agreed (as you'd expect!) It's a job for a very specialized kind of pro, we just need to make sure those pros can be on the scene and that we support them in every way we can. Maybe what happened a couple of weeks ago was just a glitch, one of those weird statistical weirdnesses, like a week with three unconnected major aviation disasters. I'd like to think so.

But I'm also ready---if there seems to be a trend begining for these school invasions to become relatively frequent---to get behind much bigger police budgets and expanded training. My feeling is, a lot more kids will be kept out of harm's way, and if the LEOs are deployed right, that might be enough to prevent these horrible incidents from ever getting started. IMO, an enhanced tactical police presence is going to have a deterrent effect that the `best' training in en masse counterattacks by sixth graders will never have...

 

[Ceicei]

School district stops teaching students to attack intruders POSTED: 9:55 a.m. EDT, October 26, 2006 BURLESON, Texas (AP) -- A suburban Fort Worth, Texas, school district has halted a program teaching students to attack a gunman if he invades a classroom, administrators said Wednesday.

See link below for more details:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/10/25/defending.the.classroom.ap/index.html

It appears that there are many who felt the same about the methodology (flawed).

- Ceicei