Jackson Heights hosts ALICE active shooter training

Recently at Jackson Heights High School, while the halls were quiet as students were gone for spring break, school and law enforcement officials from Jackson County and the surrounding area spent two days discussing how to handle a problem that many schools face while in session — the threat of an active shooter.

This particular event at JHHS, however, was intended to give school administrators and law enforcement officers training on active shooter preparedness and response, then take what they learned during that training back to their schools and law enforcement agencies.

“We’re making scenarios,” said Jim Howard, Jackson Heights USD 335 superintendent of schools of the ALICE active shooter response training. “We become trainers and we bring back what we’ve learned to our own schools.”

Howard and 15 others participated in the ALICE — an acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate — training session, held March 17 and 18 at JHHS and drew school administrators and law officers from as far away as central Oklahoma in addition to those who came from the Jackson County area.

The two-day session, as Joe Romans of the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office described it, was a “train the trainer” kind of course that “hundreds and hundreds” of schools — including some that have experienced their own violent incidents and have used the training to reduce the aftermath of those incidents — have benefited from in previous years and is now considered “the gold standard.”

“Up until 2001, there really wasn’t a national standard for school safety protocols,” Romans said. “Everybody was sort of hit-and-miss and doing different things. But then there was a law enforcement officer whose wife was a teacher, and he said, there’s a need to standardize, categorize and research the most effective way to respond to these situations, so they set this program up.”

Ken Thaxter, a “full-time national instructor” for the ALICE training through Navigate 360, the Richfield, Ohio-based firm that developed the training model, said that while the training session “isn’t really law enforcement training,” it’s a program that is nonetheless helpful for officers and teachers alike.

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