School preps for Code Red with drill

How would students react in the event of an intruder on campus during a tutorial?

That’s what the school officials intended to find out on Nov. 22 when they held a Code Red drill during the Friday morning tutorial.

The result was that most of the school handled the situation well even with the new twist of having the drill during an open period where students would be scattered, assistant principal Kevin Mount said.

“Overall, I thought the school did very well given that we’ve never done a drill during an open period,” Mount said. “One of our primary goals was just to make sure everybody got into a classroom, so by that criteria I think we did really well.”

The need for a Code Red drill can be traced back to the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in which two heavily armed students gunned down 12 students and one teacher on campus on April 20, 1999.

“The Columbine High School event really brought preparedness for intruders into the national consciousness,” Mount said. “That spearheaded a new era of emergency planning for intruders.”

Given a real Code Red situation, the school advises that all students either get inside a classroom immediately or run away if the student is on the perimeter of campus.
If caught in an open area, students should use surrounding objects to hide from view or run in a zigzag pattern in order to minimize casualties.

“Those are the things we want to blaze into students minds, to either get inside quickly or get away,” Mount said. “If a student is in the perimeter of the campus, don’t come back into the campus to hide, get out.”

Students inside should try to uphold as many barriers and barricades as possible and remain silent and hidden from view. According to law enforcement research, creating obstructions in the path of the threat will not only buy time but also reduce the chances that a killer will assault a classroom.

“Most of these folks are kind of unhinged anyway, but they do have some sort of clock running in their minds,” Mount said. “They’re very aware of how much time that they have to do as much damage as possible and they’re in a hurry.”

Despite the importance of the drill preparing the school for the actual emergency, not all students felt that the experience reflected enough preparedness for a real event.

“I don’t think there was enough discipline for a real Code Red,” sophomore Maggie Sun said. “I think people knew it was just a practice so they didn’t take it as seriously.

In addition to Sun’s concern, junior Teddy Sun felt that not enough was done to secure classroom windows.

“The windows are a lot weaker than the doors, so I was wondering why we’re barricading the doors and not the windows,” Teddy said. “The panes underneath the windows are like two dimensional, so I don’t think we would fare very well in a real Code Red.”

Mount agrees there is room for improvement in responding to Code Red emergencies.

“I think that we would be fine in the real thing, but there were still a few kids that didn’t seem to know what to do,” Mount said. “There’s some work to be done before we’re completely sharp.”