Local school reactions for Florida shooting tragedy

Wednesday’s tragedy is another reminder that mass shootings, specifically at schools, can happen anywhere, and law enforcement officials on the Central Coast are making sure people are prepared.

It’s obviously the worst nightmare of any parent, teacher, or student, but the reality is a school shooting could happen anywhere.

Luckily, districts like the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District do what they can to prepare for that very situation by using a program called ALICE. It stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate. The goal of ALICE is to train school personnel how to deal with a school shooter situation in order to minimize, if not eliminate casualties. It’s a program also used by the Salinas Union High School District.

“It has just become such an urgent matter for us to be trained to react in the unfortunate possibility of an active shooter, and I think it’s so valuable that our district provide this training for our staff on a voluntary basis, but so many benefits come from it,” said Salinas Union High School District Director of Pupil Personnel Services, Irelia Dominguez.

Another district that uses the ALICE Program is the Santa Rita school district. We talked to one of their school resource officers today who told us, in part, “All schools in the Santa Rita district conduct regular lock down drills and prepare the children for these events. All staff and classrooms have the equipment and training to handle these types of scenarios. Since we started, we have conducted lock down drills and have made several improvements although they already had excellent methods in place.”

The resource officer added that he and another officer had just gone through ALICE training this past weekend.