For staff at the Juneau School District, thoughts of life-threatening disasters are a daily consideration.<\/p>\n
In the wake of a mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday, JSD Chief of Staff Kristin Bartlett said the school district staff thinks every day about ways to protect students from incidents like that.<\/p>\n
“Unfortunately, we’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last couple weeks,” Bartlett said, “as we watch what’s happening with schools around the country and dealing with natural disasters and dealing with all kinds of other issues. It’s definitely something that we think about every day here.”<\/p>\n
The nonprofit Gun Violence Archive<\/a> defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot and\/or killed in a single incident at the same general time and location, not involving the shooter. By that definition, Alaska hasn’t had a mass shooting<\/a> since six people were wounded in an early-morning shooting on Sept. 14, 2014 in Anchorage<\/a>.<\/p>\n Law enforcement officials in Juneau would like to keep it that way. Lt. David Campbell of the Juneau Police Department said officers are constantly preparing for an active shooter scenario.<\/p>\n “We get trained all the time,” Campbell said. “It’s one of those worst-case scenarios for us, a low-frequency, extremely high-risk situation that we train for.”<\/p>\n What an officer does in the case of a shooting and what a civilian does, Campbell pointed out, are very different. Civilians must be prepared to get out of harm’s way and alert others of the situation.<\/p>\n JPD and the City and Borough of Juneau’s Emergency Management Department have worked extensively with JSD, Bartlett Regional Hospital, University of Alaska Southeast and even local business owners to prepare for a scenario of an active shooter.<\/p>\n Bartlett said there’s a flip chart located in every classroom and office in the district with instructions and plans, and that staff members all get training before the school year begins. Students then also receive training about how to respond. Bartlett also said JSD has taken measures in recent years to make access to schools more difficult, including limiting the number of entrances and having a stricter policy in terms of who can enter schools.<\/p>\n A new approach<\/strong><\/p>\n The training system that is taught to civilians across town is known as ALICE<\/a>, which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate. CBJ Emergency Program Manager Tom Mattice said that the city’s approach for a long time was going into lockdown mode, but that simply hiding wasn’t good enough. In 2015, CBJ and JPD began doing ALICE training for schools and the public.<\/p>\n