Sacramento County, CA (MPG) - Just days prior to the mass shootings in Las Vegas that left 59 dead and more than 500 wounded, Bob Erickson was presenting a day-long training for educators and staff in the San Juan Unified School District that could not have been more timely.

“Basically, we were talking about things that were done right and others that could have been done differently during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings,” said Erickson, a retired sergeant with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, now managing San Juan Unified’s Safe Schools Program.

Safe Schools is essentially the backbone of the district’s campus safety and security system, which covers all policies and procedures for initial assessments and, if necessary, responses to myriad issues and events that can go on at any one of the district’s 65 campuses in a single day, including bullying, weapons found in back packs or lockers, drug and alcohol-related offences, assaults, intruders, gang activity, suspected child abuse, and, sadly, the very real possibility of a student suicide on campus.

Established in 1988, Safe Schools operates through a partnership with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department. to select, train and assign off-duty officers to serve as School Resource Officers (SROs) who patrol, monitor and respond to incidents across five designated school zones that include all 64 campuses in the district.  SROs are assigned to roughly 5 schools each, but if needed, they will cross out of their districts to support other SROs in crisis.

In addition, the Citrus Heights Police Department also participates with the provision of two, full time SROs at Mesa Verde and San Juan high schools, which sit within the SJUSD’s boundary lines.  They also will cover a crisis if needed at other schools in Sacramento County’s unincorporated areas.

All calls for SRO assistance that are not initiated through a 911 call for police are filtered through a Safe Schools dispatcher at the district offices in Carmichael.  And, while the majority of dispatched calls for an SRO response are not lock-down or high-level emergencies like Sandy Hook or Vegas, as unlikely as they are to occur, according to Erickson, trainings for campus shootings are necessary and, in the recent case, involved the keen eye of hindsight to in reinforcing protocol.

“The seminar was called ‘Lessons Learned From Sandy Hook,’ and I started out by saying the chances of a school shooting happening on one of our campuses are very slim,” says Erickson.  “We are constantly aware that a school campus or workplace shooting can happen anywhere, but statistically, the odds are very low that we will have a campus shooting like Sandy Hook.  That said, someone always wins the lottery. Our trainings are not to scare anyone, but we need to be prepared.”

District-wide staff trainings like these, as well as a regular review of policies and procedures for handling an entire range of campus emergencies are held roughly every three months for teachers and staff, along with SRO representatives and other Safe School team members.  

All schools in the district are required to have a "Comprehensive School Safety Plan” in place that should be made available for public review at any time. 

In the case of Sandy Hook, says Erickson, many teachers and students exposed themselves to the gunman by trying to run first rather than hide, following a previously standardized policy of run, hide, fight, which today winds counter to the tactic advocated by many Safe Schools teams, including San Juan’s.

“Here in the San Juan School District, we look at it as hide, run, fight,” says Erickson.  “If you can run to safety, do it.  But if you are not sure, we advocate hiding first.  At Sandy Hook, you had teachers who hid kids in cupboards and other places and called 911.  That was exactly the thing to do.  In other instances, however, teachers heard shots and went out to investigate and they were killed.  So if you hear something that sounds like a shot, it’s probably a shot and you should hide.”

In addition, first responder protocol has also changed, according to Erickson, since the Columbine school shooting in Colorado in 1999.

“Before Columbine, law enforcement or SROs would arrive on the scene, form what’s called a ‘perimeter’ around the school, and then wait for reinforcements before going in,” said Erickson.  “Now, they are trained to just go in.”

Trainings rotate from campus to campus and are usually held on shortened days in the afternoon to ensure everyone who wants to attend can, Erickson said.  In a few weeks another “active shooter” and high-alert response workshop will take place.  Attendees will be given a range of scenarios, broken up into groups and charged to each come up with their own strategies for effective response.

One aspect that also gets emphasized in active shooter trainings that will also be highlighted, is the concept of friendly fire.  Erickson explains it best.

“One of the things we also emphasize is a hands up policy,” Erickson said.  “If you are walking on the campus during a lockdown and law enforcement is there with weapons drawn, you always want to keep your hands where they can see them. Hands are what kill people. The hand is needed to make the gun go off.”

The district is also amidst implementation of a campus fencing program launched several years ago.  According to Keith Reed with the schools facilities department, a total of eight campuses identified as high-priority sites, such as Del Campo High School, now have fences.  At a cost of $1 million, the pace of the project is slow and, cautions Reed, they serve as deterrents, not guarantees against the possibility of a high-alert crisis.

“The fencing helps, but really the focus is to serve as a deterrent, which is why we have the SROs and trainings in place,” Reed said.  “They are designed in a way that forces visitors to enter the campus through the main office and they are not cheap, so completion is based on when funding comes available.  But we do prioritize based on the needs of each school.”

Greif counselors are also part of the Safe Schools team and are trained to provide support to school counselors and psychologists in the district in responding to a crisis, such as a student suicide and other highly charged, emotional events.

“Sadly, we do have student suicides in schools,” says Erickson.  “It happens. And when it does we have staff who are trained to comfort those in crisis and help allow students to have their emotions. We never want to advocate for anything else.”

Student threats against schools are common.  And, it’s Erickson’s job, working with Safe Schools team members, to identify those threats, discern which are real and respond accordingly.  As unlikely as mass shootings in schools are, in all cases where they have occurred, according to Erickson, there were warning signs.

“Kids post threats against their schools on social media all the time,” says Erickson.  “It’s almost weekly that the threats come in.  Now, is it likely the student is going to come (to school) with a loaded gun?  No.  But we take every single threat as if it were real.  Every shooting we’ve had (in the country) there was a message sent out by the shooter in advance.  In cases where we do perceive the potential of a threat to be real, we will go out to visit homes. We’ll find out if there are guns registered at the house. We look in (students’) bedrooms, we check it out to see what’s going.”

While parents have not been flooding the district since the Vegas shootings to ask about their school’s safety plans, they do call.  Regularly. And their calls, says Erickson, are important.

“I wouldn’t say that I’ve had any calls of concern about Vegas or since that event,” says Erickson.  But we do get calls from parents every day about something and when we do, I investigate it, triage it and if there is something we need to respond to, we do.  Believe me, I spend a lot of my day on the telephone just talking to parents to assure them that we are all about student safety, safety for all the students and the staff and the families.”

For more information about Safe Schools, visit www.sanjuan.edu