East High School in Anchorage, Alaska had an active shooter drill this week in which a police officer walked the halls firing blank shots from a handgun, as students stayed inside their classrooms.
During the drill, principal Sam Spinella gave a fake description of the shooter over the intercom, and assistant principal Josh Green walked the halls as the officer was shooting to gauge classrooms’ reactions, KTVA reported. The purpose of the training was to teach students what gunfire would likely sound like in the hallways in a real active shooter situation.
IT’S ONLY A DRILL! East High’s school resource officer fires blanks inside the school to simulate an active shooter. Training teaches students what gunfire sounds like. pic.twitter.com/ytnOhO0L6Q
— Heather Hintze (@HeatherHintze) March 6, 2018
“So many times you read about these active shooter situations where they hear a gun going off like that, and they think it’s something different,” Green told KTVA news. “You’re programmed to think ‘I’m safe all the time,’ right, so when you hear something like that you think, ‘I’ve got to take some action on this.’”
Spinella said he sent out an email to parents last Friday so they could talk to their children about the drill.
“We don’t want to scare them,” Spinella said. “We want this to become as close to reality as possible.”
Green said the drill had been planned for weeks and was not a response to the Parkland, Fla. shooting last month.
