Reexamining CUSD safety protocols amid absence of School Resource Officer

Published October 3, 2024

BY AVERY PALSHAW

On the morning of Sept. 4 in Winder, Georgia, two Apalachee High School students and two teachers were killed while nine others were wounded in a shooting, making the attack the deadliest school shooting of 2024. According to Police 1, School Resource Officers Tanner Good and Brandon King played a crucial role in ending the mass shooting by quickly confronting the shooter with their own weapons, causing him to stand down and be taken into custody before any further harm could occur. Adept in handling the unthinkable, Good and King had undergone nearly 2,000 accumulated hours of specialized training on school threat response, including active shooter response, threat assessment in schools and safety procedures.

In light of this tragedy in Georgia, it begs the question: How prepared is Carmel High School in case of a similar threat involving an armed intruder?

At CHS, the current system of response in the instance of an armed intruder entering campus is ALICE–Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate–an active shooter training program used in over 6,400 schools nationwide. What ALICE entails is that, depending on the situation at hand, students and staff should immediately inform others of an intruder’s location on campus and share updated information as it becomes available, and either barricade the classroom, combat the intruder by throwing objects at them or evacuate the building to a designated meeting point.

At the start of each school year, all Carmel Unified staff are contacted by CUSD director of student services Cassandra Ziskind to complete mandatory online training in ALICE, where staff answer hypothetical questions and assess various situations.

“It’s helpful for teachers to know all the different ways they can happen and be prepared for those, and a school needs to have something, so it’s good that we have ALICE,” says CHS mathematics teacher Andrea Smith.

Although some teachers affirm that ALICE training is beneficial for knowing what to do in the case of an emergency, others say that physically running through drills or coming up with a better plan for students would be more effective.

“We do a computer training that’s the same every single year, and the answer to nearly every single question is to throw your clipboard or an object at the intruder, which is not always the best case scenario,” says psychology and economics teacher Nora Ward.

Though it may not be possible to fully prepare for an unexpected intruder, and the topic can evoke anxiety in some, many CHS students and staff say they feel a lack of preparation for such an incident. Students at CHS are generally familiar that ALICE is a system in place if there were to be an armed intruder on campus, but say they are not familiar with what the acronym actually stands for or what action they are expected to take.

While CHS principal Libby Duethman says that all teachers are required to cover safety protocols with their students during lockdown drills, CHS teachers report not receiving explicit directions from the district to instruct their students specifically in ALICE.

“I’ve never been told that I have to talk about [ALICE] with my students other than when we do a drill,” says geography and government teacher Bill Schrier, who takes the initiative of talking to his classes on the first day of school each year about the various steps of ALICE and medical response that students can take during an emergency, like the three “C’s” — Check, Call, Care. “It’s a mistake for a teenager to assume that the adults around them are going to be prepared to respond to an emergency because people panic,” adds the head of the CHS Medical and Response team. “We all need to learn this stuff.”

From 2018 to 2023 Deputy Kevin Gross served as the district’s first SRO, and for the 2023-24 school year, CUSD received SRO Brian Postadan from the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office to serve as a safety provider throughout the district and a resource to staff and students, but the position has not been filled again this year.

Based on files from the County of Monterey website, the process of placing the SRO at CHS was a collaborative agreement between the Sheriff’s Office and the school district, as both groups signed a Memorandum of Understanding, agreeing that an SRO would be effective July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024. The MOU stated that CUSD agreed to reimburse up to $150,000 to the County for a deputy who would be assigned as the SRO.

“It’s good to have a resource officer on campus that can legally deal with things that are problematic, but outside the scope and realm of a teacher or an administrator,” says art teacher Steven Russell.

According to Duethman, last spring CUSD hired safety consultants to view school sites around the district to determine what needs to change in order to create safer campuses. Duethman says that though having an SRO is beneficial as a safety precaution, the number one goal is to prioritize the emotional and mental well-being of CHS students.

“Fences won’t make any difference. An SRO won’t make any difference,” explains the high school principal. “It’s really about being aware of how everybody is doing, having relationships with all the students and being aware of if someone is going through a crisis.”

In 2018, CHS went into a lockdown on the day of the annual Recognition Assembly and Day on the Green after a student was on campus after making online threats about bringing an incendiary device to school that could cause harm to others. The entire student body and staff were held in the gymnasium for several hours, and while nobody was harmed, staff say students were permitted access to their phones, which, according to National School Safety and Security Services, can distract students’ attention from safety and emergency response directions, spread misinformation and slow the response time of authorities by accelerating the arrival of parents at the scene of the emergency. Amid the active lockdown, the gym doors were opened at one point to let in boxes of pizza for students to eat.

As for planned lockdown drills, CHS practices two shelter-in-place drills and one full evacuation with an emergency response team activated each year. In a recent Sept. 16 drill, students say their sixth period class stopped to practice the routine of closing blinds, locking doors, turning off lights and remaining quiet. Some students did report that class activities continued.

Assistant principal Ernesto Pacleb says that the drill went well and only took about six minutes to complete.

“I personally walked around and tried to open a lot of doors,” says Pacleb. “Every door that I tried to open was locked, which was great.”

According to Principal Duethman, CUSD is currently waiting to hear from the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office on whether another SRO will be provided to the district.