Let’s hope everyone learns lots of lessons from the Gilroy High
School code red drill. The drill, designed to imitate an armed
intruder incident, certainly raised red flags.
Let’s hope everyone learns lots of lessons from the Gilroy High School code red drill. The drill, designed to imitate an armed intruder incident, certainly raised red flags.
There’s no question that the boorish behavior exhibited by some students – urinating in classrooms, damaging school property, rifling through teacher’s possessions, setting a fire, and more – demands a a strong reaction from school officials.
Suspension and expulsion are reasonable consequences, and it should be made clear that criminal charges are possible, and the Gilroy Police Department should back that up. These students endangered their fellow students and the GHS staff and damaged taxpayer property.
Let’s hope that the parents of the students who engaged in such dangerous, uncivilized acts send a strong message that such barbaric behavior will not be tolerated by enacting stiff penalties at home.
But the code red drill raised bigger-picture issues as well.
First, let’s hope some practical lessons were learned. Calling a drill when students are out of class, as this one was, creates undue chaos. On a campus with as many students as GHS, its difficult to ensure that barricaded students are properly supervised.
That presents liability issues for the district for risks to students victimized by out-of-control unsupervised students. If code red drills happen when students are in class, that risk is greatly reduced.
Second, do code red drills really need to take so much precious instructional time? An hour and a half seems like an unreasonable intrusion on the school’s primary mission of education.
All of which leads to the biggest-picture question of all: What’s the proper balance between preparing for scary but statistically unlikely events like an armed intruder and carrying out our normal daily lives?
It’s easy to understand why, in our post-Columbine/9/11 world, the balance might have tipped too far in the direction of preparation.
Abandoning code red drills is not an option, but scaling them back to levels more in proportion to the threat is. Let’s teach students how to react in case of an armed intruder – why they need to shelter in their classrooms, build a barricade and understand what an all-clear signal sounds like – but let’s do it in a less grandiose manner. Modeling code red drills after earthquake and fire drills, which take less than 30 minutes and are fully supervised, seems reasonable.
If police need longer-term access to the GHS campus to practice their response to an armed intruder incident, schedule it for after school or weekends when instructional time won’t be impacted.
This code red drill offers lessons not only in how to respond to an armed intruder, but how to manage code red drills as well. As a community, let’s heed all the lessons it offers.
