PALM BEACH, Fla. — For the past 13 years, the Palm Beach County School District's police force and local law enforcement agencies have routinely trained to handle a situation similar to the shooting that killed one student at an Ohio high school Monday.
"We're very focused on our schools and the crisis plans," said School Police Chief Jim Kelly.
He said that in 1999, shortly after the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, the school police held a four-day training session at Royal Palm Beach High with law enforcement and a consultant.
Before then, the standard plan for such situations was to wait for backup and SWAT teams and then enter a school in force to neutralize a shooting threat, Kelly said. But during that four-day session, police realized that most incidents would be over by the time SWAT officers arrived.
So they developed a new plan called the "active shooter" scenario.
Rather than waiting for backup, an officer who arrives first on the scene will search for the shooter on campus to neutralize the threat, Kelly said. Officers arriving later will focus on evacuating students.
Kelly said school police practice these procedures every summer. Students and school personnel have a crisis drill at every school once a semester. Students are trained to follow teachers' directions, and the teachers receive instructions from school administration to either lock their classrooms or evacuate the students, Kelly said.
Kelly said officers often implement parts of the plan when they lock down a school to keep students safe from an unrelated police incident nearby.
Initial reports about the Ohio shooting indicate that the suspect was known by other students as an outcast who had been bullied.
Palm Beach County had the most reported bullying incidents of any school district in Florida between 2007 and 2010, but district officials said that was actually a sign that anti-bullying efforts were working.
More students were following recommendations to use tips boxes and hotlines to report bullying, officials said.