The sun rises as weary students trickle inside the building welcomed by a gush of warm air. Around 1,840 students roam the hallways of FHN with their friends, not paying any attention to the man with the gun in his holster.
He wears a faded, sky blue uniform and holds a walkie-talkie in his right hand.
Static escapes the dark, black box.
It’s no emergency, just a call that someone is needed in the main office.
Patrick Fitzgerald has been working as a resource officer for 14 years, five of which have been in the maze-like building of FHN. His familiar uniform makes him stand out from the overwhelming masses, for he is the only law enforcement officer at FHN. His job seems simple: to keep the school safe. But to be able to do so requires special training.
Multiple departments, including Fitzgerald’s, get together once a year and complete an eight-hour training session. In the session, they work through what to do in an intruder situation.
Brad Krieg, who has been working for the St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department for almost 27 years, believes it is hard to get adequate training in just one eight-hour session a year and thinks police should train more often.
“You do the best you can with the budget you have,” Krieg said.
Although the length of the session hasn’t changed, there have been other changes made to how the departments train. One of those changes, is that all of the different police departments now train together so that they go about the same way of doing things and can work together better in a real situation.
“As we learn to do things, we also learn better ways to do things so our training is not stagnant,” Fitzgerald said. “It evolves on a yearly basis to create a more efficient response.”
The yearly training session is supposed to keep Fitzgerald prepared for things that may never happen. Along with being prepared, Fitzgerald has to be aware of what’s going on in the school in order to keep it safe.
“Students are going to know–are going to hear–other students. There’s so many ways they can talk back and forth with Twitter, text, and everything,” Krieg said. “Don’t take any tread lightly.” Three years ago, a student from McCluer High School in Ferguson, intruded FHN. Nobody realized he did not belong to North besides some students who knew he was coming. Fitzgerald did not find out about the intruder until after the student had left the building. Word got around that the student was intending to fight someone but left when he could not find who he was searching for. The next day, Fitzgerald went to the student’s school and arrested him for trespassing.
The school’s staff also has to be prepared to handle an intruder situation. At the beginning of every school year, the staff has a meeting where they review procedures. In the meetings, the staff has the opportunity to ask questions or make suggestions for the procedures. In each classroom, there is a binder that contains all of the steps of safety procedures for different situations such as fires, tornados, earthquakes and lockdowns.
Each staff member has an assigned job they have been trained to do in order to keep the school safe. Along with that, the staff has been cross-trained so they can step in and fill the spot of anyone absent. Substitutes are given information on safety procedures as well. Throughout the school year, the school practices intruder drills so that everyone knows how to handle a real one if it were to ever happen.
“Right now, I think we have worked very hard to keep the procedures simple, easy to follow, and promote the utmost safety for our kids,” Tony Grippi, the assistant principal at North who has been in charge of the safety procedures for 13 years, said. “At this particular point, I don’t really think there is anything we can do to improve it.”
According to Grippi, it has proven more effective to announce that an intruder is in the building instead of using a code word to announce it like they have in the past. This is because an intruder is more likely to leave if they know the school is aware of their presence.
“If you think about it, if there was a person with a gun, what we do is exactly what you should be doing,” Michael Leistner, who has been a teacher at FHN for 24 years, said. “I think it’s what you would do anyway. Even if no one told me that that’s what I had to do, that’s what I would do anyway. It makes perfect sense.”
If an intruder were to break in, both staff and law enforcement would work together to ensure the school’s safety. An announcement would be made over the intercom system that there is an intruder in the building. Fitzgerald would call on the radio for assistance while a staff member would call the police along with the central offices to give more information. Someone would be in charge of sending a mutual aid report out to all of the emergency response departments.
Police from all over St. Charles County, who are already on the road, would race to the school. According to Grippi, the response would take around five minutes or less. Teachers would be preparing the classrooms for lockdown and quickly pulling students inside from the nearby hallways and restrooms.
Law enforcement would seek to end the situation with the intruder. They’d have to determine if they are to try and make the intruder give up, isolate him, or remove him from the scenario.
If the intruder made it into a classroom where he was holding people hostage, the room would be secured and the area cleared, the SWAT team would come in, and negotiators would try to negotiate a peaceful ending. If the intruder began shooting, Fitzgerald along with other law enforcement would sweep in to terminate the situation.
“If something like that would happen, every teacher would know what to do because when you practice something and do it over and over again–just like anything else–it becomes instinctual,” Leistner said.
