- [John] Police officer, open up.
- Part of it is just kind of,
it's always in the back of your mind,
is this gonna be the last day I go to school?
- [Narrator] Since the shooting at Columbine High School
in April 1999, Jefferson County Public Schools
has found itself at the center
of the fight for safer classrooms.
They're using lockdown drills to prepare teachers
and students if a gunman enters the campus.
Kids as young as three years old go
through these drills on a regular basis.
This April, Jefferson County gave HuffPost exclusive access
to a drill at one of their local elementary schools.
We sat in with a third grade classroom,
but for security reasons, the district has asked us
not to reveal the students' faces or hiding places.
- I've been referred to as the generation
of mass shootings, Generation Columbine.
I've grown up doing shooter drills
and everything like that, which is unlike my parents
or a lot of millennials and everything.
It really shows how our culture has really evolved,
yet we've done nothing to change it.
If lockdown drills prevented mass shootings,
we wouldn't be having this conversation.
- [John] I'm impressed with how quiet you are.
Good job today.
I love your positioning right here at the front of the door.
- There's lots of what-ifs, right?
They have lots of what-ifs,
and we could spend days talking about what-ifs,
but what if something really does happen?
Well, what if this happens at our school?
You know, I always respond to them
we practice these drills so that we can stay safe.
Our job as adults is to keep you safe.
- With the lockdown, we wanna make sure
that they're dropping on their hands.
- [Narrator] As the largest district in Colorado,
Jefferson County is home to over 86,000 students.
And in the past 19 years, it's been the birthplace
of new standards for lockdown drills
and specialized law enforcement training.
John McDonald is the district's executive director
of safety, security, and emergency management.
Over the past decade, he's trained officers
and led drills in the county's 157 schools.
With each one, he hopes to shave precious seconds
off the time it takes to secure every classroom.
- Really, it's a program that empowers students,
and that's what we love about it so much.
We call it emergency-prepared, not emergency-scared.
That's the term that I've really come up
with over the years to explain
what the standard response protocol is.
It's four actions.
It's lockdown, lockout, shelter, and evacuate.
As I understand it now, there's well over
26,000 schools around the country.
Has anybody called to dispatch yet?
- Not yet. - Okay.
Why don't we go ahead and let dispatch know
we're gonna start this, and then whenever you're ready.
(knocking on door)
- Sheriff's office, open up.
Come on out.
It's okay, we're all done.
Hi everybody.
You guys are really good.
I like how quiet you are.
Okay, so here's what we're gonna do.
I need everybody to stand up for me
and be super quiet, no noise.
Be as quiet as you can be.
I'm gonna have you follow your teacher.
You're gonna go in a single-file line.
We're gonna evacuate to the gymnasium, okay?
All right, good job.
Follow the teacher.
- A lot of the times with school shooters,
they used to go to that school,
or they've been a student within the past 19 years.
They know exactly how lockdowns work.
They know that you're still in the room
even if they can't see you.
Shooters, people who do this, they're not stupid.
- If you do nothing but lockdown
behind a locked classroom door,
we know that's incredibly effective.
We know that's a time barrier between you and the bad guy.
We know that there's only been two instances
in 20 years of bad guys breeching
a properly locked classroom door.
So if you lockdown, then you're my hero.
If you evacuate with kids, you're my hero.
You make a good decision to protect kids and yourself,
then you are my hero.
- [Kid] It's my birthday today.
- When you're thinking about I wanna be a teacher
when I grow up, it's not the first thing
that I think that you think of, but as teachers,
you kind of become that momma bear
or that papa bear and know that that's what you're gonna do.
I feel prepared with the training
that they've provided us as administrators
and even as teachers across the years.
- [Narrator] The Frank DeAngelis Center for Community Safety
is the first of its kind in the country.
It's named after the former principal of Columbine
and was once a working elementary school.
Now it's used as a hyper realistic environment
to train thousands of law enforcement officers
for active shooter situations.
- Imagine you're the first responder on scene.
You're the officer coming in.
You've got shots being fired in a school.
You walk in, you see smoke.
You don't know what's happening,
but you can hear the shots being fired
at the end of the hallway.
You gotta fight your way through the smoke.
Explosive devices, IEDs, are used
in these school shooting events in many cases.
Columbine was a perfect example.
Of 99 IEDS in the building, 49 went off.
In Arapahoe school shooting, he had Molotov cocktails.
We've seen that time and time again around the country,
so we practice and train for that.
The first officers on scene cannot wait.
They can't wait for a SWAT team.
They can't wait for four to five more officers.
The problem is by the time four officers get there,
most of the lives are lost.
So, they created a tactical program
for the single officer.
We put all of our patrol teams in our school district
through that training annually.
It's a requirement.
You have to successfully complete that.
It's so important.
- I believe we should continue with the lockdowns
until we really do see a change in our country
where this isn't really happening anymore
and we don't have to have lockdowns.
But there's still so many flaws to it
where no one is prepared at all.
How can you be prepared for a shooting?
- All right.
We can do some cool things with the simulator.
We can fill this room with smoke if we want.
Darrel can turn on lights here
so that we can create an environment
not unlike law enforcement's gonna face
moment in time, or were gonna be
in the middle of as we respond to a crisis.
- Adam six, shots fired.
What's your status?
The system will track these shots fired,
so we can go in and see what his accuracy level is
in reference to the system because this will enhance,
even though you're talking to a screen,
you're stress level really goes up,
and it can affect your shots.
- So we also build targets in classrooms.
And the whole purpose of this is shoot, don't shoot.
So who's the bad guy, who's holding the gun?
- [Narrator] 32 states now require their schools
to develop a plan for emergencies.
Of those plans, 96% include training their students
and teachers in how to respond
to an active shooter in the building.
At Columbine High School,
lockdown drills are part of the normal routine.
Students like Kaylee Tyner say the drills are necessary
but more needs to be done outside
of schools to solve the problem.
- I'd say if anything,
it's just a huge disruption to your learning.
Unfortunately, in an ideal world,
we wouldn't have to prepare for these things at all
because you should be safe going to school
without a question, you know.
And the fact that here in America you're gonna go to school
and once a month we're gonna do these set of drills,
it definitely kind of,
it becomes part of your cycle of going to school.
I don't wanna say we shouldn't have them
because obviously there is a need for them.
But there's more that has to be done.
It's now up to our politicians to really do their job
and protect the citizens of the United States
by implementing laws that are really going to help us.
My hope for the future, I'm not gonna be unrealistic
and say that I hope next year no school shootings happen
because I've always hoped that and always been disappointed.
But I hope that by the time I have kids
and I send them to school, I don't have to transition
into suddenly being a parent that now fears
for their children like my parents do.
- It does make me sad.
We always tell kids you're safe,
but they say they see things around the world.
And safety is number one, and whatever we can do
to help them be safe for a changing world
that's gonna be their world when they grow up,
I think is important.
- So you know, 19 deceased, 29 wounded
in schools from gunfire in Colorado.
And certainly Columbine redefined it
I think on the national level.
And we continue to feel that.
It hasn't gone away.
It's something that we never say can't happen here.
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