Five students, a teacher and a guard were shot dead by a 16-year-old assailant at a high school in Red Lake, Minn., last week, making that city the latest to be plagued by a school shooting.
And while Minnesota may be hundreds of miles away from Caldwell County, the possibility for a similar incident here is quite real, local law enforcement officers say. The Heath High School shootings of 1997 drove that point home.
It, and subsequent shootings in the time since, have led to the development of a school shooting response plan for county emergency units.
Sheriff Stan Hudson, the plan’s primary organizer, discussed it with county critical service providers during a March 18 meeting.
“We live in a new era,” he said. “You need to look at it like it can happen here.”
The plan, produced in cooperation with the county school district, includes photos of the county’s primary, elementary, middle and high schools, all in close proximity on the Marion Road campus.
Aerial photos of the school complex were provided by AirEvac, and ground photos documenting each entrance to each school were supplied by the Times Leader, the sheriff said.
Having those entrances identified will make it easier for law officers and emergency personnel to coordinate their response efforts.
In the past, that response consisted of isolating and containing the shooter or shooters, evacuating the other students, faculty and staff inside and then waiting for a SWAT team or other tactical responders to arrive.
Not anymore.
“We’ve had to change our thinking in law enforcement,” Hudson said.
Most school shootings in recent history did not involve hostages, he said. The shooters either targeted victims or shot indiscriminately.
Consequently, the goal of the new response plan is to end that shooting as soon as possible.
The plan utilizes the QUAD (Quick Action Deployment) concept, developed by Columbus, Ohio, officers after the Columbine High shootings in April 1999.
The philosophy is simple: stopping a shooter as quickly as possible to minimize other loss of life.
Hudson and his five deputies have each been trained in the QUAD system and are working with other area law enforcement agencies to share their training.
“My goal, after taking the training, is to get us thinking and all be on the same page, so that if it did happen here — whether it be the state police, city police, fish and wildlife, the sheriff’s department, whoever — that we’d all be on the same page,” he said.
“No system is going to be perfect,” he added, “but we all know if we have a plan, and if we’re thinking about it, that it will save lives.”
A benefit of the QUAD response plan is its applicability to other locations, he added.
“It not only happens at schools,” he said. “It’s factories, restaurants, anywhere. And this system will work anywhere. That’s what’s good about it.”
In addition to photographs and floor plans of the school buildings, the county’s formalized response plan also features traffic control plans, command post locations, evacuation points and special issues at each school, Hudson said.
The plan has been in development for the last year and a half, he said, spurred by school shooting incidents around the area.
More than 30 school shootings have been documented in the country since 1996.
With the development of the county’s plan, officers now train periodically at the county’s schools to be better prepared should such an incident occur.
“We pray that it would never happen in Princeton,” he said. But if it does:
“We’re going to work to be as prepared as humanly possible,” he said.
