There is nothing like advanced planning and emergency management training to more effectively handle a potential disaster. And in the case of Fayette County schools, a worst-case nightmare would be to have a gunman enter a school.

That was the scenario at Fayette County High School April 21 when agencies from throughout the county held a tabletop exercise designed to produce a plan to subdue the perpetrator and protect students.

“It’s a cooperative effort when you have a tabletop exercise to practice what would happen in a given scenario and how people would respond,” said Fayette County School’s Assistant Superintendent of Operations Sam Sweat. “So the scenario was that a person was able to get into the school armed with a rifle and other weapons and where several students have been shot. This kind of scenario is our worst nightmare. We wanted to see how we would respond. We walked through the response steps. An emergency plan is fine on paper, but things change in real life. So you actually practice a tabletop exercise. The best way to be prepared for a difficult situation such as what happened at Virginia Tech or Columbine is to actually prepare and practice a tabletop exercise.”

The exercise began with the school resource officer spotting an individual on a hall with a high-powered rifle and a backpack. In the scenario, a female with a handgun was identified later.

While beginning his initial pursuit of the male, the officer immediately contacts law enforcement and a SWAT team is mobilized.

Participants from the various agencies played out the scenario from there, discussing their response areas and the precautions to be taken to subdue the individual and protect students.

“We talked about a unified command center and what we’ve all been trained on with NIMS (National Incident Management System),” Sweat said. “What has changed from Columbine is that the thinking then was to wait and contain. Today the thinking is to pursue and to be aggressive. So the exercise gave us a way to give a lot of answers within the scenario and it gave us a way to pose questions with all the agencies present to comment.”

Other aspects of the exercise included safety and evacuation of students, staging areas for the various response agencies, a landing zone for helicopters, the control of airspace over the school and the task of handing the crowd of media and onlookers that would be certain to be drawn to the area.

Additional aspects of the exercise included management of the off-campus site where the mass of students would be taken after evacuation and securing the crime scene after the incident, Sweat said.

Participants included Fayette County High School, Fayette County Board of Education, Fayetteville Police, Fayette County EMS, Peachtree City Police, Georgia Emergency Management Agency, Fayette County Fire Department, Tyrone Police and ambulance services.

Referencing the table top exercise, Fayette Fire and Emergency Services Lt. Scott Roberts said the physical and psychological protection of the county’s children is the priority. Such an exercise provides a way to assess and train for crisis scenarios from a cross-jurisdictional perspective, he said.

“This is the kind of thing everybody has trained for since 9/11,” said Roberts. “The idea was to work together in a seamless way. And it went real well.”

Sweat stressed that advanced preparation is the best way to deal with such an event if it were ever to occur in the county. This is especially true given that several similar events across America have occurred in communities like Fayette, those that are upper middle income communities with bright children who have access to technology.

“We know Fayette is not sheltered from it,” Sweat said.

A tabletop exercise is a time for all agencies involved in a response to consider and ask all the questions that would be pertinent if or when such an event were to occur. How many doors in a school are locked? Should classrooms be locked all the time? Should access be limited to exterior doors? How does a school’s security system tie into the law enforcement system?

The questions are many and are intended to anticipate the variables that may arise, Sweat said.

Fayetteville Police Chief Steve Heaton assessed the tabletop exercise as being one that worked well and provided a variety of agencies the opportunity to work together in a time of crisis.

“The tabletop was in a controlled environment that gave us the opportunity to demonstrate that the agencies can work together in an event we hope will never happen,” Heaton said. “The exercise went extremely well.”

The tabletop exercise at Fayette County High School was preceded by one a few years ago at Starr’s Mill High School and will be followed by another in the near future at McIntosh High School.

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