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NHPS Supt. Iline Tracey at school board meeting: "Now they're saying, 'If you can fight back, fight back.'"
(Updated) School staff are no longer advised to just hide during active shooter situations, but instead to fight back.
That update was given by Superintendent Iline Tracey at Monday’s hybrid Board of Education meeting, which was hosted both online and in-person in the cafeteria of Barack Obama School at 69 Farnham Ave.
During Tracey’s superintendent report, she shared that the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) district is rolling out an updated active shooter training for school staff.
“A lot of things we learned about this, we used to say, ‘Hide,’ and now they’re saying, ‘If you can fight back, fight back,’ ” Tracey said.
Click here and here for recent articles about Connecticut schools updating how they respond to active shooter situations, and click here to read about how bystanders like teachers have intervened to stop gunmen from killing even more people amid this nation’s plague of mass shootings. This updated NHPS policy comes as this country has already suffered from scores of mass shootings so far this year, including in late March at a private elementary school in Nashville.
NHPS Head of Security Thaddeus Reddish will be training school staff on-site, Tracey said. He’ll be starting with school administrators.
Schools spokesperson Justin Harmon added that the updated training procedures were recently presented to the district’s executive team and Tracey in a private meeting. Tracey said she plans to share the presentation with the school board.
Harmon said the district is currently scheduling mandatory hour-long trainings with all teachers and administrators in all city public schools.
“While we perform regular drills, we haven’t done a full training in a while, and we believe we should update our community about common practice in this area,” he said.
Lockdown drills are undertaken every school year at all schools, Harmon added.
Update: In a May 4 email comment, Harmon provided the following statement about this coming NHPS training:
“The US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and law enforcement experts are recommending an approach that depends on our thinking carefully about the options available to us in an active shooter scenario. This approach is summarized as ‘avoid, deny, defend’:
• Can we avoid the shooter? If so, that is our best option.
• If we can’t avoid the shooter, can we deny him access to our location? If so, then that is our next best option.
• If we can’t avoid him and we can’t deny him access to where we are, how do we defend ourselves against him? Fighting back is always a last resort, but potentially necessary if there is no other option.
“This is an overview of the training that our security office is planning for our schools. While we all regret that living in 2023 requires us to prepare for this possibility, we’re committed to doing everything we can to help protect our school communities from harm. We hope this clarification will help members of the community better understand the approach and measures we are taking at NHPS.”
Leslie Blatteau testifies at recent Board of Education meeting.
In response to the announced new training, city teachers union President Leslie Blatteau said the union has been asking the district for months for the updated crisis training. She said the union is also still requesting that staff also receive updated protocol for debriefing and support services that are necessary after lockdown situations.
“What’s also needed is updated protocol after lockdowns or lockdown drills for staff to get the information of what happened to feel safe again,” she said.
Blatteau added that New Haven teachers have expressed recent concerns over active shooter safety when they see a broken door or lock or a lack of security in their school building.
She suggested supports be put in place to help all school staff have conversations and address stress and other mental health issues that come as a result of hearing frequently about school shootings across the nation. “It has to be a trauma-informed approach for us all because that fear is there,” she said.
Click here and here for resources around active shooter situations.
Watch the full meeting broadcast above.