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Schools and MPD work on preventing tragedies

Active shooter training, safety protocols discussed at House Education Committee

School buses are driven down Liloa Drive beside Lokelani Intermediate School and Kihei Elementary School in January 2022. As students head back to school after winter break, local police and school officials discussed ways to keep students safe in active shooter and other emergency scenarios during a House Education Committee briefing on Tuesday. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo

If an active shooter were on a Maui school campus, the school resource officer or the responding officer would “go directly to that threat,” and not have to wait for backup, a Maui Police Department sergeant told state lawmakers on Tuesday afternoon.

“The general standard practice in law enforcement these days is, we don’t wait. If there is active shooting going on then we are going to go directly to that threat. We are not going to wait for backup necessarily,” said Sgt. Brandon Phillips, who is also a school resource officer. “I say that speaking for Maui, I don’t want to speak on behalf of the other departments, but that is what we are trained to do.”

Phillips was discussing active shooter protocols during a briefing of the House Committee on Education, chaired by Maui state Rep. Justin Woodson. The committee held an informational briefing at the state Capitol on Tuesday afternoon to receive updates on safety-related impacts from the state Department of Education and the Hawaii State Public Charter School Commission. Active shooter protocol was one of the topics discussed.

“This is an open discussion, we want to make sure that everyone is on the right wavelength to make sure that our kids are safe in all these different facets,” Woodson said during the briefing.

DOE Superintendent Keith Hayashi said that according to national data, there were 51 shootings in schools grades K-12 in the U.S. last year, with the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history taking place in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults died in May.

Law enforcement came under fire after the incident as officers waited more than an hour to breach the classroom with the gunman and victims inside.

“While we hope never to be faced with this type of unspeakable tragedy, we do have emergency preparedness plans and programs in place to equip our schools to the best of our ability,” Hayashi told lawmakers. “These plans are designed to ensure our schools are prepared to respond to, mitigate and recover to man-made and natural disasters.”

When asked by lawmakers if there have been any school shootings in Hawaii, Hayashi said there are none that he or his staff at the briefing knew about, but in 2013 there was an incident in which a firearm was brought to a school campus but was not discharged.

Oahu Rep. Scot Matayoshi said he recalled that in 2008 in Nanakuli there was also an incident of a firearm on a school campus, so “it certainly does happen.”

Hayashi went over the ways the DOE is trying to mitigate the potential for violent incidents.

Last year the DOE held trainings in which more than 1,000 employees were trained to analyze threat assessment and learned behavioral intervention tools to help identity disturbing signals from students and determine when intervention is necessary so students don’t harm themselves or others.

There is also regular coordination and communication between DOE and law enforcement agenices, including the FBI, state Department of Public Safety and police departments across the state.

Emergency drills are also held at schools, Hayashi said.

The DOE also has emergency operation plans at the department, complex and school levels and is also working on assessments of Hawaii’s schools to detect weaknesses and vulnerabilities of safety and security capabilities.

Since 2017, 116 schools have had their vulnerability studies done, and currently 17 schools are scheduled for the assessment, Hayashi said. There had been a lag in the assessments due to the COVID-19 pandemic while schools were physically closed.

Officials expect all assessments for all public schools to be done in three years.

Active shooter training is also available.

On Maui, Phillips said MPD, through its resource officers, offers three types of training for potential active shooter scenarios.

One is a presentation that looks at other active shooter cases and education on the matter.

Another option is the presentation along with drills, where staff can practice what to do in a lockdown and how to defend themselves.

Another option is also having a “full-on exercise” in addition to the education, with officers role playing as intruders and as the responding law enforcement agency.

He said none of the training is done with students, nor do they intend to do so. But police would like to have age-appropriate conversations with students, especially high school students, on what to do in case they end up in a vulnerable situation.

As a parent, Phillips said he advocates for active shooter preparedness, as he would want his child’s teachers and administration to know what to do in an emergency.

He said he had an age-appropriate conversation with his elementary school-aged son, who now knows what to do and how to get home in case of an emergency threat.

Phillips said MPD currently has eight school resource officers on various campuses, mainly high schools. There are 12 authorized positions, but with the labor shortage they are unable to fill them all.

The SRO program began in 1999 with federal funding, but now it is funded by the Maui Police Department.

The officers serve as educators, counselors and mentors and are also the ones who are on campus to respond to and prevent incidents from happening.

Phillips said SROs are also the ones to respond to the “text a tip” program, in which tips can be texted to a generated number from Google and then sent to the school resource officer, principal and vice principal.

Tips could range from students vaping to someone having a gun in a bathroom.

Phillips said this is only available in schools with an SRO, which is the one that responds to the messages.

Hayashi said that Kauai County and Hawaii County also have school resource officers, but Oahu does not. He noted that all schools have security attendants but the DOE is also having a hard time filling all the positions.

Overall, Hayashi said the number of school threats has been increasing, from 103 in 2019, to a low of 47 in 2020 during the height of the COVID pandemic when students were out of school, to 124 in 2021 and 152 in 2022.

The threats include vague social media and graffiti threats, emails, phone calls or fax, threats with targets and TikTok challenges.

* Melissa Tanji can be reached at mtanji@mauinews.com.

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