While a few dozen Hawaii public schools so far have received “run, hide, fight” training for responding to an active shooter on campus, demand is rising, and the state Department of Education is considering changing from providing it to schools on request to making it required.
The FBI has emphasized the “run, hide, fight” approach in its active-shooter resources online. The title means escape is considered the most effective first step. If that’s not possible, hiding and barricading are next. Fighting an assailant is considered a last resort. “You’re fighting for your life. Don’t fight fair,” says a video on the FBI’s website.
Blue Line Solutions Hawaii, a local company made up mainly of retired and current local law enforcement officers and first responders, presents lectures on the “run, hide, fight” strategy along with practice in skills such as evasion and building barricades out of desks.
All school staff, including custodians and cafeteria and office workers, are taught along with teachers. Lessons are customized for the open design of Hawaii’s school campuses. “There is some work going into this to make our schools safer. We are doing the best we can at making schools the safest we can,” a company spokesperson said.
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The Hawaii State Teachers Association in December for the first time independently offered its members a webinar by Blue Line Solutions, and will offer more if there’s demand.
Meanwhile, Hawaii’s public school system has ramped up its efforts to prevent targeted violence from happening on campus.
In June, 84 state Department of Education employees were trained in the Salem-Keizer Student Threat Assessment System, which was developed by a school district in Oregon in the wake of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. The goal was to create “a statewide cadre of complex-area threat assessment trainers,” said DOE Communications Director Nanea Kalani.
The Salem-Keizer system, used by hundreds of U.S. school districts, is a set of protocols and procedures in which adults are trained to spot behaviors and risk factors in students who pose a risk of harm to themselves or others.
School officials will work together with law enforcement, mental health experts and other professionals to assess cases and carry out intervention plans to defuse and help students “before they reach crisis level,” said state schools Superintendent Keith Hayashi.
The cadre of trainers is tasked with teaching other school employees. In July an additional 800 school-level employees were taught methods for recognizing and managing students who might pose a threat.
Lina Alathari, chief of the National Threat Assessment Center, part of the U.S. Secret Service, says that creating trained teams in the latest behavior intervention/threat assessment strategies is crucial to preventing targeted school violence. She said the state as a whole has been gaining momentum on this. Compared with when local officials began consulting with the center in 2019, she said, “Hawaii has come a long way.”
Creating centralized reporting systems where students and school employees can report tips 24 hours a day is also key, said Alathari, who was brought to Oahu last week to help train public and private education leaders in preventing targeted school violence. When Pennsylvania launched its statewide reporting system in 2019, it received more than 40,000 tips, she said. “Kids need to know where to go when they see something that’s concerning, because that could be an imminent risk.”
