The Good Life – July-August 2018

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OPTIONS FOR SURVIVAL NEW LOCKDOWN PROCEDURES PUT YOU IN CONTROL WRITTEN BY: ALEXANDRA FLOERSCH • PHOTOS BY: URBAN TOAD MEDIA All too frequently our televisions, newspapers and social feeds inform us of the horrifying school shootings, sending terror and disbelief running through our veins with every life lost to violence. "Columbine is what literally changed my career path into doing this for a living," said Chris Potter, Cass County deputy sheriff and school resource sheriff. Today, Potter is part of a group called Cass-Clay Unified School Response (CCUSR) – established in 2006 – which protects approximately 42,000 students, school staff and faculty in 16 school districts. For years, the traditional lockdown has been the prominent procedure for keeping students safe, "but a lot of that thought process came from an incident that happened in California quite some time ago with drive by shootings," explained Captain Jesse Jahner of the Cass County Sheriff’s Office. "Of course, those incidents are quite a bit different because you had a person who was trying to engage from the outside of the building as opposed to an active shooter who actually makes it inside.” With North Dakota clutching its treasured title as one of seven states still untouched from a school shooting, law enforcement knew they needed to make a change to keep it that way. Thus, Options-based Lockdown was created. REDEFINING SAFETY Back in 2005, law enforcement knew they couldn’t implement a new lockdown procedure before they ensured they were on the same page with protocols and strategy. That meant pairing up for active shooter training. "We can't make things 100 percent structurally safe all the time, so there needs to be another option people can revert to and try and protect themselves." – Jahner 6 / THE GOOD LIFE / urbantoadmedia.com
"It took a few years to get everyone on the same page and really hone those tactics," Jahner said. But eventually – like a well-oiled machine – Cass and Clay County Sheriff’s Offices, as well as Fargo, Moorhead, West Fargo and North Dakota State University (NDSU) police departments were speaking the same language. The next step was to define the new procedure. Having used (1) 'Run, Hide, Fight'; (2) 'Get Out, Hideout, Take Out' and (3) ‘Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate (ALICE)’ in the past, CCUSR combined the methods to form a hybrid program. "The average school shooting in this country is over within 4 to 6 minutes,” Potter said. The transition to Options-based Lockdown meant buying time for teachers, students and school faculty until law enforcement could arrive on-scene to address the threat. "There's just a short window (of time) and, if people are able to defend themselves, there's a better chance of survivability in these types of situations," Jahner explained. urbantoadmedia.com / THE GOOD LIFE / 7
Page 2 and 3: FATHERS // MR. FULL-TIME DAD WRITTE
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Page 10 and 11: WRITTEN BY: KATIE JENISON 10 / THE
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Page 14 and 15: HAVING A BEER WITH // GUNNER AND DE
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The Good Life – July-August 2018

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