If someone begins shooting at the students or staff at Fleming K-12 School in northeast Colorado, football coach and bus driver Scott Muller wants to be ready to shoot back.
“Something like this is nothing you want to do,” Muller said during a break from the active-shooter training course he took this week. “But anybody who wants to protect kids, they will take something like this on.”
After all, said Muller, it’s unlikely help would be nearby if someone attacked Fleming School, about 20 miles east of Sterling. The local sheriff told him “they are so far out they won’t be able to respond in time to do much. It will be pretty much left up to someone at the school to do something.”
Muller is among 17 teachers and administrators from five mostly rural counties who received intensive training this week on how to prevent — or at least minimize — a mass shooting at their schools, many of which are in far-flung areas where it would take law enforcement up to 30 minutes to respond.
Each participant already has a concealed handgun permit and is approved as a school security officer. As many as 20 Colorado school districts have designated teachers, administrators and other personnel as armed security.
But the course work laid out this week by Ohio-based FASTER — Faculty/Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response — is much more intense than a typical concealed weapons class in Colorado, said participants.
“This,” said Muller, “is a whole new level.”
Which means there is no sugarcoating of the consequences of not confronting someone bent on killing everyone within reach.
“You will be killed if you do not fight,” said Chris Wallace, a 41-year law enforcement veteran, as he introduced students to the course.
The educators sat in silence as Wallace showed slides of the results of past mass shootings and described in stark terms what might happen to victims in the next attack.
“Adult males will be tortured and killed,” he said. “Females will be raped and killed. There will be no mercy involved in these situations. There is no talking yourself out of these situations.”
Good training will remove unneeded emotion from your response to an attacker, Wallace told the educators. That will make a counterattack more effective, he said.
“You’ve to get inside the moment,” he said. “Don’t go so fast that you miss what you need to see.”
“When you engage the shooter, you need speed and surprise and violence of action,” he added.
FASTER’s instructors — current or former law enforcement officers — have trained nearly 900 Ohio school staff members over the past five years. No matter their day-to-day roles — teacher, superintendent, librarian, coach, secretary — school staffers going through FASTER training are taught how to approach and shoot an active assailant. They are also tutored on hand-to-hand fighting skills, and they learn advanced medical training from a trauma surgeon.
On the second morning of the training, the educators learned how to apply a tourniquet to a fellow student’s arm and leg in the midst of chaos, practicing the act of cutting off the flow of blood to keep someone alive.
Later in the day, all 17 took to the shooting range where, under a blistering sun, they learned how to properly remove a handgun from its holster, quickly but surely approach an attacker and level their weapon to shoot. Just as important, instructors showed them how to safely holster their sidearms and wait for emergency help.
The three-day class was held at the Weld County Sheriff’s Department shooting range. It was organized by Coloradans for Civil Liberties, a gun-rights group aligned with the right-leaning Independence Institute.
Tuition is $1,000 per student, and the Independence Institute offered scholarships.
“We have raised scholarship money because we never want the lack of training budget money to keep any school personnel from having access to this lifesaving training,” said Amy Cooke, the institute’s executive vice president.
Graduates will be certified as exceeding Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training handgun qualifications, said Laura Carno, co-founder of Coloradans for Civil Liberties.
“We want to give them world-class training so they can stop active shooters at their school,” Carno said.
School districts that use staff as security personnel screen them extensively, say school officials. That includes administering psychological tests often used on law enforcement recruits.
“The screening is pretty tough,” said Muller, the Fleming football coach. “I took a psychological screening, like other applicants. But some dropped out. And I can understand why. It’s tough that one day you may have to take down a student that you’ve known for a long time.”
Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams offered use of the shooting range for training because he supports Second Amendment rights. He also wants rural school staffers to be able to protect themselves, said sheriff’s spokesman Matt Turner.
“We all know there is anxiety about sending your kids to school and wondering if they will be safe,” Turner said. “We wanted to help in any way we can to ensure kids’ safety.”
Fleming parent Carmen Vandenbark said most parents support school officials deciding to arm qualified staff members. Fleming is fairly remote and has no local police department, and response times from first responders can be lengthy.
“It was a good, common-sense solution,” Vandenbark said.
But others say active-shooter training for teachers will do little to protect students and might make a bad situation even worse.
“In armed confrontations, trained law enforcement hit their target only 20 percent of the time,” said Eileen McCarron of Colorado Ceasefire, a group that opposes gun violence. “In a crowded classroom, what happens to the remaining 80 percent of the bullets? And how do we expect a nervous, far less-trained individual to perform anything but worse?”
Ronnie Wilson said he took the training to help ease the fears of parents who worry about school security.
“One of the first things parents ask about are academics, and the next thing is whether their kids will be safe at our school,” said Wilson. “And that is our highest priority.”
Wilson is president of the governing board of Liberty Tree Academy, a K-8 charter school slated to open in Falcon, near Colorado Springs, next year.
“This has been real eye-opening for me, and a great experience,” Wilson said of the FASTER training. “I know we can’t be prepared for everything. But I now know I’m better equipped to handle the worst kind of situation.”
