By Olivia Massucci · Staff Writer
Grove City College’s Student Life & Learning and Incident Management Team (IMT) are leading a series of training sessions on the run, hide, fight model, a framework for surviving an active shooter incident.
The sessions are one hour long and held at various times in rooms in Staley Hall of Arts and Letters, according to a March 3 email to students.
Isaac Cooke, resident director of Hopeman Hall and one of the training facilitators, said the sessions are designed to empower students to respond quickly and confidently in unsure situations.
“We aren’t giving a plan, but something that applies to the classrooms in HAL, STEM, their residence halls, that can just be ‘OK, something’s happening, here’s what I can do. I don’t have to process, I can just act,’” Cooke said.
The training initiative grew out of the after-action assessment of the swatting incident in September, according to Mandie McCreadie, director of Student Care.
“Anytime anything happens, folks will come together. … (They will be) assessing what went right, what went wrong, what could’ve been done better,” McCreadie said. “None of us are perfect all the time, but the difference is what we learn from that and how we assess and engage and create actions to be better in (the) future.”
Cooke noted that the swatting incident already showed that having some trained students makes a difference in emergencies.
“I know for me, in the after action when we were debriefing, seeing that there were some students, RAs especially for me in Hopeman because we were right next to the library, RAs like Noah Byun, who absolutely did everything right and calmed down the situation, took care of people, because they’ve gone through the training,” Cooke said. “If it had been a real situation, it would’ve saved a lot of lives in that area. Now we’ve prepared more people to step into that space.”
McCreadie and Cooke emphasized the importance of breaking students’ mindsets that violent incidents will never affect them.
“I think for me it’s what I said, not living in a mindset of ‘it’ll never happen to me.’ I’ve actually heard those words out of students’ mouths, and that’s just not a very safe or smart way to operate. We live in a fallen world, and all of us are susceptible to the darkness that operates in the world we live in,” McCreadie said. “We have no one plan that’s going to say you’re all going to survive an active shooter event if one were to truly come to our campus, but what can we do to prepare our students to give them the best shot that they have?
“All those folks at Columbine and Virginia Tech and Illinois; they thought it would never happen to them,” she said.
The sessions also encouraged students to sign up for Omnilert, the college’s emergency notification system.
“If our students don’t have instructions, then we have 2,100 variables meandering around campus either actively engaged in the midst of it, or completely unaware,” McCreadie said. “The more students and faculty and staff that are getting those alerts, the more folks that are all on the same page, getting the same instructions. It’s official notices, and that is of such utmost importance in an emergency situation.”
Cooke insisted that the time attending one of the sessions is well worth it, noting that the tragedies of past shootings make the sessions lifesaving.
“We know what happens when you’re ill-prepared. It’s not good,” Cooke said. “So why not be prepared, even if it’s never going to happen? That’s the impetus of pushing this a little more. We’ve been targeted once. OK. That wasn’t an actual real situation, but why not be prepared now? Lose an hour of time and potentially save your life. That seems like a pretty great deal to me.”
