They must, though, a police trainer said, guiding local teachers and school workers through a training designed to help them create a plan that could someday save lives.

Trooper Robert Mitchell, of the Michigan State Police-Alpena Post, led a virtual seminar Thursday morning from the offices of the Alpena-Montmorency-Alcona Educational Service District, teaching teachers gathered at school buildings across the region about human response to extreme stress.

If a shooter enters their school building, teachers won’t have the mental capacity to make decisions unless they’ve already planned how they will react, he told them.

Some of the materials he shared — including audio of a 911 call made by a teacher barricaded in a school library during a 1999 school shooting in Columbine, Colorado — left teachers emotionally shaken.

News Photo by Julie Riddle At a virtual civilian active shooter response training at the Alpena-Montmorency-Alcona Educational Service District central office on Thursday, Trooper Robert Mitchell of the Michigan State Police-Alpena Post displays a video created by the federal government teaching tactics for surviving a mass shooting.

Thinking about what could happen is hard, but necessary, Mitchell said.

“I’m sorry this has to be one of your skill sets,” Mitchell told the teachers. “But, if something terrible happens, we’re trusting you with our children.”

The Thursday active shooter response training followed multiple safety meetings and assessments of local school buildings by police and other emergency responders in recent months.

The group identified some structural changes needed to improve building safety, in addition to new entryways under construction at several local schools. Suggestions include installing locks on bathroom doors and securing inside windows to slow down a potential shooter trying to get into a classroom.

Alpena Public Schools recently announced a set of new security measures for students and visitors it will implement this school year to improve safety.

Even with rule and structural changes, teachers may someday have to confront a crisis face to face, and they need to be mentally ready, Mitchell said at Thursday’s training.

Planning now what they might use to block a door to keep an intruder out will help them take that step later, when the adrenaline and rapid heart rate of an emergency situation dampens their decision-making ability, he said.

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He played an audio clip of a teacher telling a 911 dispatcher about the shooting at Columbine High School, in which the teacher, at first desperate and distraught, shifts into an almost calm voice, narrating her attempts to protect students as gunshots grow closer in the background.

In an emergency, if they plan ahead, teachers can notice signs they are losing mental abilities and work to take back control.

“I need to slow down,” teachers can tell themselves, Mitchell said. “I need to make a decision here.”

Often, people hearing gunshots attribute the sound to fireworks or some other, more comprehensible noise.

“That’s because the brain is more able to process fireworks than someone shooting at people,” Mitchell said.

Calling this the brain’s denial phase, he urged teachers to bypass such thoughts as quickly as possible and go straight to figuring out what to do.

He shared classroom body counts from a 2007 shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, also known as Virginia Tech, showing that classrooms in which teachers and students took specific actions to escape or defend themselves suffered fewer fatalities.

In one room, a professor and Holocaust survivor blockaded the door with his body while his students escaped through a window. The professor died, but most of his students survived.

In another room, where students blocked the door with their feet, nobody was killed. In a classroom where no steps were taken to escape or block the door, 77 people were killed, Mitchell said.

If all else fails, teachers may have to attack the attacker.

“Grab the gun,” Mitchell said. “Fight. Be aggressive. Swarm the shooter.”

Before Columbine, teachers never thought about such things, said Ashlie O’Connor, instructional technician and data specialist for AMA ESD, present with Mitchell during the training.

When she taught at Alcona County schools in the past, teachers could focus on teaching. Now, with school shootings part of their reality, they have to prepare to fend off attackers and get their students out of harm’s way any way they can, O’Connor said.

“Not gonna lie,” O’Connor said, reflecting on Mitchell’s presentation during a break in the training, “Now I’m going to look for exits everywhere I go.”

The training could apply to anyone who works in a public setting, Mitchell said.

He has led similar trainings for local businesses as well as individual schools, urging participants to know their exits and develop strategies for response if escape becomes impossible.

For some Alpena-area teachers — many of them new and some of them not yet born at the time of 9/11, much less Columbine — Mitchell’s information could force them to think about something they’ve never faced before, he said.

Most of all, he wanted teachers to know that they have the power to take action, in the worst of circumstances, to protect their students to the best of their ability.

“You are not helpless,” he told them. “What you do matters.”

For information about surviving an active shooter situation, including videos shared at Thursday’s teacher training, visit fbi.gov/survive.

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.

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