Public safety officials undergo school security training session

ALBANY — In the wake of the recent Parkland, Fla., school shooting that took the lives of 17 people, the Dougherty County School System held an active shooter tabletop training exercise Tuesday at the system’s 4C Academy.

The training event included city and county law enforcement and public safety personnel, as well as various personnel from the school system.

The training included four phases:

1. Notification: The school notifies law enforcement of shots fired in the building.

2. Deployment: Appropriate agencies sent to the scene.

3. Response: Agencies take action against threat/respond to casualties.

4. Stand down: Agencies return to normal duties.

DCSS Public Information Director J.D. Sumner said the system has a partial plan in place now, but that the DCSS is looking into putting together a broader plan that would also include notifying parents and moving students out of the building via buses to a safe zone at the former Albany High School.

“We also learned after Parkland that social media was disseminating a lot of information during the incident, giving minute-by-minute updates,” Sumner said. “Some of that information was correct, some was not.”

Sumner added that the system wants to use sources inside the building to provide accurate information to parents via the DCSS web app.

“No matter where an emergency arises, we have a location we can bus the students to and the parents know to go there to pick up their kids,” DCSS COO Joe Harvey, the training coordinator, said. “What we don’t want are parents rushing to the sound of gunfire because that makes law enforcement’s job a lot more complicated. In all the active shooter situations I have seen on the news, you always have parents coming in trying to get their kids. That makes things crazy for the school district.

“We’ve got to ingrain in our parents that they need to let us take care of the kids.”

Sumner said while the system does not currently have active shooter drills in place, plans are being put together to conduct those drills in the near future.

Late last week, State School Superintendent Richard Woods provided detailed information to school districts regarding $16 million in bond funding available to help schools enhance student safety. The funding was appropriated by the Georgia General Assembly this year. Every local school district will receive a base amount of $25,000, and the remaining $11.5 million will be allocated based on the number of students enrolled in each district.

State law requires districts to use the funding for improvements or refurbishments to a district’s physical footprint (for example, fencing or security doors) and/or equipment that can be capitalized (for example, security camera systems).

Dougherty County’s share of that funding is $120,000.

“We are grateful for the extra money to provide additional security at our schools,” DCSS Superintendent Ken Dyer said. “We plan on using the extra funding to install metal detectors at schools that don’t have them and to purchase additional security cameras.”