Between 2000 and 2013, 117 people died in 39 school shootings across the United States. During the same time period, zero people died in fires at schools.
Clark County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Granneman said it’s easy to see why. Schools are inspected and held to fire codes, equipped with sprinklers, and staff and students regularly do fire drills. Most of all, people remember a three-word slogan for if you ever find yourself on fire: stop, drop and roll.
“What do we do for active shooters? Up until now, nothing,” Granneman said. “We haven’t done a whole lot other than lockdowns.”
But the Clark County Sheriff’s Office is trying to change that. Last week, Granneman taught the first active-shooter training at Hockinson High School, naming the program after its own slogan: Run, Hide or Fight.
Because school shootings are a sensitive topic for school officials and parents, the training as a whole was one that took time to get everyone on board.
“The reality is it’s not a pleasant topic,” Granneman said. But, he added, “the enemy is denial. … It’s unfortunate that this is now normal, but if we talk about it, engage in conversation about it, it’s something that’s not nearly as scary.”
Granneman, who is the school resource deputy, developed the program with Sgt. Bill Sofianos, who was previously the school resource deputy at Hockinson.
The two crafted a program after gathering useful information, including material released by the Department of Homeland Security, and got it approved by sheriff’s office administration and the Hockinson School District.
Emma Goodman, a freshman at Hockinson High School, thought it was good information to know, even though it made her a bit uneasy.
“I see it a lot, and I don’t want to think about it happening at our school,” she said.
Kyle Nute, also a freshman, agreed it’s all a good thing to think about.
“I was important for them to tell everybody,” he said.
A few of the students hanging around with Nute and Goodman at the school’s front entrance Friday afternoon said they had thought, abstractly, about what could happen.
Edward Kovalenko, a sophomore, has friends who were at Reynolds High School in Troutdale during the shooting there in 2014, and said the unthinkable has crossed his mind more than once.
“The reality is, we can’t really expect an active shooter program to work if we don’t include students,” Granneman said. “Let’s help them make better decisions and equip them with the survivability in the rare occurrence that an active shooter event occurs.”
The directives that Granneman gave the students during the assembly-style presentation were self-explanatory: run first, hide second and fight as a last resort.
“We want you to run out of the school,” Granneman said. “On average, these events end in 2 to 5 minutes, and less than 1 percent of the time, the active shooter leaves the building.”
The “hide” component is similar to a lockdown drill — lock the door, turn off the lights and close the blinds. But it also includes new components such as looking to escape through the window, and if that’s not an option, to barricade the door, Granneman said.
The last directive — fight — was the one that Granneman said is usually met with raised eyebrows.
“We’re not training anybody to be a ninja,” he said. “If you are confronted with danger and you have no other options — you can’t run, you can’t hide, your life is now on the line — we want you to fight for your life.”
The feedback he got after the training, he said, made him believe it was beneficial.
“Several students thanked me for the presentation,” he said. “One young man said he never thought about running out of the school. … That wasn’t on his radar.”
And the skills are those that Granneman said the students can take with them when they go to the mall, off to college, into a movie theater or attend a public event.
Granneman said he hopes to spread the training to all students in Clark County and that he’s already gotten interest from other school districts, including Ridgefield, Vancouver and Evergreen.
He said that at the end of the day, he’s appreciative that people are open to talk about these traumatic and tragic incidents.
“We don’t want to talk about people coming into schools and killing children,” he said. “But if we don’t address it, we won’t change anything. … We want to empower people to make better decisions to increase survival.”
