Minford Will Stage Active Shooter Drill
By Frank Lewis
December 1, 2016
Remember the fire drills that schools perform regularly? Or maybe you are old enough to remember the nuclear attack drills where you were told to get under your desk and protect your head. In most cases they were just routine drills. Now the new reality is that schools have to prepare themselves for the possibility of active shooters, which is why an active shooter scenario will take place Friday (Dec. 2) in the Minford Local School district.
The public is being notified in advance so they won’t panic over the activity going on at Minford schools.
“We are doing a district-wide lock down and it will start at 1 o’clock (p.m.), so the students will just practice the “shelter in place” drill and we’ll monitor, and make sure everything works with that,” Jeremy Litteral, Superintendent of Minford Local School District said. “Immediately afterwards we’re going to do an active shooter scenario. We’ve done these for about three years now”
Litteral said the district does not do a full-scale active shooter scenario complete with someone portraying the potential shooter.
“We just have the procedures in place where we make announcements throughout the building, saying where the mock shooter is located,” Litteral said. ‘We have a staff member just walk in those locations so that we can track them by camera and use all of our systems in place for that.”
That portion of the drill is expected to begin at 1:05 p.m.
“We will just walk them through the buildings so the different levels of the building can practice that either they shelter in place or they evacuate the building, whatever is deemed according to the safety plan,” Litteral said.
Litteral said Captain Robert Woodford of the Scioto County Sheriff’s Office will be on hand and he is expecting the Minford Fire Department to be at the scene as well, to keep control of possible traffic issues. He said the Ohio State Highway Patrol was also notified of the drill.
At a recent such drill in the Portsmouth City School District that included only faculty and not students, Captain Chris Lowery of the Portsmouth Fire Department expressed the importance of such drills.
“We don’t have a choice nowadays,” Lowery said. “We have to. We have to prepare the schools and the faculty and eventually this will be with the students.”