Every year more than 300 schools experience a school shooting. So it is important that the staff at the school know what to do when the time comes. This year leading up to the first day of school all the staff came in to do an active shooter drill training to ensure that in an emergency they are prepared to keep themselves and their students safe.

“Through trainings like this, we gain the ability to be prepared,” business education teacher Jesse Frailey said. “Part of our job as teachers here is to make sure that all of our students are safe, and to do that, we have to be trained in a way that’s realistic and sometimes scary. I learned that sometimes in a situation like this, the hard decision might be the right one. We had security banging on our doors, yelling, ‘let us in’ or ‘help we’re hurt’ and if we’re trying to protect a group of students, those sorts of things may not be okay to help people with. So it was very realistic, and we had a lot of very rough experiences with it. Overall I think it’s a good thing, and it’s something that we should continue doing.”

Today the threat of a school shooting is very real and many schools have experienced it before. These trainings, while they may be frightening, are very necessary to keep the school, its staff and its students safe.