Millville faculty getting 'active shooter' training
Joseph P. Smith
MILLVILLE – Staff at city schools opened their 2018-19 school year with a four-hour training session on Tuesday morning about dealing with “active shooter” incidents.
The instruction came from the Millville Police Department and district administrators already have gotten a briefing, according to Sgt. John Redden.
The training ran from 8 a.m. to noon at Lakeside Middle School on North Sharp Street. Staff broke down into smaller groups after an opening presentation in the auditorium.
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Redden said Airsoft guns and air horns will be used to simulate the use of firearms. Atlantic City police officers also took part in the training.
The training approach comes from a program developed at the ALICE Training Institute, a security training company based in Medina, Ohio. ALICE is an acronym for a series of its recommended responses to a shooting situation that are taken while waiting for police to arrive: Alert; Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate.
Kim Carty, president of the Board of Education, attended the training and afterward said the program was about giving teachers "more choices about how to respond when things happen in their classes."
"It is about disrupting what a bad guy is trying to do," Carty said. "Anything that you can do to disrupt the thinking pattern of someone who is coming in with one singular thing on is mind.
"It’s not _ `do this and only this,'" she said. "It's _ 'here’s lots of things that you can do and here’s how you end to evaluate the situation and choose the best told from the toolbox.' We’re not asking them to sit in a corner anymore and be a victim."
In March 2017, schools Superintendent David Gentile said the district had been meeting with Millville police about the ALICE program. He stressed the contacts had come before a recent shooting incident at a public school in Florida.
At the time, Gentile said the plan was to begin the following month having brief staff meetings to acquaint faculty with the outlines of ALICE and then implement training for all staff in September 2018.
Day one of school for students is Thursday.
This story was updated at 2:50 p.m. Tuesday.
Joseph P. Smith; jpsmith_dj; (856) 563-5252; jsmith@gannettnj.com