How Kansas City Schools Are Preparing for the Unthinkable

Across the metro lessons pause several times a year for something that at one time was unthinkable—an active shooter drill. It’s an unsettling ritual for what educators hope will never occur, yet it’s become as routine as the tornado and fire drills that once defined school safety.

From Overland Park to North Kansas City, schools are not only tightening security and upgrading technology but also reviewing plans and rethinking the way they interact with students and the community.

School officials and first responders have learned from many tragic shootings that knowing how to work together before an incident occurs and moving quickly is key to quickly subduing an active shooter and limiting loss of life, says Chris Winger, the Johnson County Med-Act’s Division chief of operations.

“Out of the different incidents [school shootings] that have been reviewed and picked apart by the experts, there’s two overarching [action] themes,” Wigner says. “Stop the killing is the main one. Instead of the patrol officers just surrounding a school waiting for SWAT, it’s now decided that they need to go in there right away and move directly towards the threat. [The second theme is collaboration.] First responders are now actively collaborating and creating plans. I really hope it gives our providers and our law enforcement and everyone else a better level of comfort when they get to the situation.”

Drill Debate

The common protocol for schools to follow during a live shooter event is run, hide, fight. But there are concerns with exactly what that means and how it should work.

Melissa Reeves, the past president of the National Association of School Psychologists who co-authored the NASP PREPaRE School Crisis Prevention and Intervention curriculum, is also a member of the NASP National School Safety and Crisis Response Committee.

Reeves says that school administrators and law enforcement need to be prepared for many different types of situations. “I do not at all like the run, hide, fight language because that was designed for adults,” she says. “We would never want to teach kids that you were expected to fight an intruder. You could lose your life. Obviously, younger students in particular are not going to physically be able to match up if that intruder is an older adult. So we in schools have been very careful of the wording we used. But we also acknowledge that with some of the older kids, if they choose to make the independent decision that they’re going to try to counter the perpetrator, that’s a personal choice.”

There is an ongoing debate about how drills should be conducted. “We are coming out very strong that unannounced drills should never be done anymore, especially those around active assailant type situations,” Reeves says. “It is traumatizing if people think it’s a real situation when it’s not. Then, when you do have a real situation, people may not know if it’s a drill or real. Then what if law enforcement gets called in because someone doesn’t know it’s a drill? They could take out an innocent role player thinking that it’s a real person.”

There is a school of thought that the more real a drill is, the better it is. Law enforcement says if it’s not at a high sensorial level, when an actual situation occurs, people will freeze out of fear or lack of understanding about what to do.

“We say, no, we don’t light a fire in a hallway to practice a fire drill, but we still all know what to do if there’s a fire,” Reeves says. “So we have had to counter this thinking.”

Public schools in the Johnson County area—Olathe, Blue Valley, Shawnee Mission—do highly sensorial active shooter drills with Med-Act in vacant buildings at Shawnee Mission West or St. James Academy in the summer or inside the old Yellow Freight building at I-435 and Roe.

“Active shooters can happen in all types of venues,” Winger says. “And to actually have role players and smoke machines and poppers and noise devices to try to make it as realistic as possible, and to simulate what that type of scene may look like, helps because people could get an idea of what that response looks like and what their role is.”

School Security Strategies

For the most part, Kansas City-area grade schools and high schools all have their own safety protocols. But many are reticent to explain them.

School administrators contacted by Kansas City magazine either didn’t respond or politely declined to discuss their safety protocols for fear that it could give a bad guy leverage for an attack.

David Laughlin, Rockhurst High School president since 2018 and the school’s former principal, says when doing preparedness training, there’s a lot he could talk about. “But if you ask me specifics, I might defer because part of what you do to prepare is to know what your plan is and not have that known to everybody at the same time,” he says.

School violence has increased over recent years, Laughlin says, and broadly speaking, Rockhurst has implemented safety protocols to ensure the campus has a good, secure community-based feel. Rockhurst recently hired a full-time director of security, Captain Jim Swoboda, who was with the Kansas City Police Department for 27 years and has a son at the school. “A big part of what we wanted in that position was the leadership to help us improve, be trained and be looking at these things with a more professional eye,” Laughlin says.

Several security measures have been taken, such as installing electric locks controlled by a key fob on every door. “There are a good number of school leaders who have a fob to lock doors,” Swoboda says. “If I heard something was happening down at the football stadium, I can use that particular fob and it’ll lock every door we have on three separate campuses right now. It contacts the police. It’s a high level of security and automation.”

St. Teresa’s Academy has updated their security over the last year too, says Robert Wynne, who has been the school’s head of security since 2018. St. Teresa’s school has added a second onsite security officer, become more actively engaged with neighbors to communicate and monitor activity in the school’s surrounding blocks, added 50 parking spaces to provide students with closer and more convenient campus access, and implemented an upgraded security system that will allow greater surveillance and control capabilities.

Wynne, who also had a long KCPD career before coming to the all-girls school, works with a state intelligence network to analyze school violence data in real time. “A lot of the intel information we get comes from the Missouri Information Analysis Center down in Jefferson City and the local center that we have here,” Wynne says. “They tend to have the portals and the access to the information on a national level. They can look for trends and stuff that may not be local but that may be moving this way.”

Wynne takes that intel and works with Siabhan May-Washington, president of St. Teresa’s Academy, where they discuss what kind of information they’re going to share with the faculty and staff on a daily basis. “The goal is to keep complacency from creeping in and understand that the response scenarios that we have will fit with any given emergency,” Wynne says. “Keep it basic, keep it as simple as possible so the response is appropriate. And then be able to adjust, adapt and overcome because nothing is textbook.”

The school administration is willing to dig in and do whatever is needed to ensure that students have no reason to be nervous about their safety, May-Washington says. “We’ve done things, and there are many things in place, so they don’t have to worry,” she says. “But we’re keeping our eyes on the ball.”

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