Training Students to Rush a Gunman? Not a Good Idea, Says Safety Expert
by Jim Brown
October 20, 2006
(AgapePress) - - One of the nation's foremost experts on school security is criticizing a school district outside Ft. Worth, Texas, for teaching its students how to fight back against classroom intruders.Burleson, Texas, is reportedly the first school district in the nation that has trained all of its students and teachers how to retaliate against a gunman who might enter their classroom. A company called Response Options has taught students how to take down an attacker and encouraged them to consider using classroom objects -- books, pencils, etc. -- as weapons. According to one Associated Press report, students and teachers are trained to go toward the intruder as fast as they can and "lock onto the attacker's limbs and use their body weight" to bring the person down.
While the Burlseon school district obviously endorses that approach, Ken Trump -- president of National School Safety and Security Services -- says he cannot support the self-defense training. As he points out, "we're talking about kids in a classroom" -- not an airport full of adults who can make tactical considerations and split-second decisions.
"These are kids who are going to be in fear, who are going to be afraid, and who are going to be looking to the adults to tell them what to do," says Trump. "We don't want kids to put themselves in jeopardy and make a poor judgment decision and end up getting killed."
School officials in Burleson says they are simply drawing upon lessons learned from school shootings such as Columbine and the recent Amish schoolhouse attack. But Trump believes it is unwise to tell young students to fight back against a gunman.
"What we want to see are kids who are following the direction of a well-trained, highly alert school staff, paying attention to the adults and letting adults make sound decisions in an emergency situation," he says. And what is not desirable, he adds, is creating a situation where "14-year-olds [are] taking their own lives into their own hands, trying to attack gunmen, and having even more kids killed than what already could potentially occur."
The security expert says the White House-convened school safety conference last week did not break a lot of new ground, but it reinforced to him that "many schools have not mastered the basics of school violence, prevention, security, and emergency planning lessons" that were learned from Columbine massacre in 1999.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
