Long before Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland, school district officials throughout the country were concerned with student safety.

In the era of the Cold War, students took part in air raid drills by ducking under their desks. Through the years, there were other possible threats, but most were small-scale or personal beefs contained to one or two people.

That all changed when two students walked into their high school on April 20, 1999, and massacred 12 of their fellow students and one teacher. Since then, most schools added intruder drills to their regular fire drills.

Tamaqua Middle School Principal Chris Czapla remembers that “The thoughts and plans then were to have students and staff huddle together in a classroom, as far away from the door as possible, in lockdown mode. That’s not the way we in Tamaqua think anymore after our administrators became trained in the ALICE program last summer.”

ALICE is the acronym for a multifaceted safety program that can be individualized for specific schools and workplaces. The letters stand for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate. The course was taught last summer at the Schuylkill I.U. and brought together educators, law enforcement and instructors. Tamaqua’s administrators created a Tamaqua-specific plan, then shared what they learned with teachers and staff during an Act 80 day before the start of the 2018-19 school year.

The next step was to have students become familiar with the ALICE plan with drills scheduled for Feb. 14. Mother Nature interfered with those plans when school had to be canceled due to a winter storm. The drill was then rescheduled for April 10.

For safety reasons, Czapla declined to discuss specifics of the district’s ALICE plan, but said, “We want staff members and students to be better prepared in case there is a violent intruder scenario. It’s no longer safest to just huddle together in a classroom. If possible, they need to evacuate, but if that’s not possible, we want then to learn techniques to counter the actions of an intruder.”

While several other safety programs emphasize skills and techniques that might be considered as “fighting back,” ALICE training does not teach fighting skills, as they require an extensive time commitment to become skilled. Instead, it teaches the skills needed to counter an attacker’s ability to shoot accurately. A swarming technique, to take back control, is included as a last resort. All recommendations and training are conducted at age and ability appropriate levels.

Czapla says the initial staff training involved five or six possible scenarios, with Wednesday’s student training designed to give administrators and staff an idea on student response. “More drills, including possible unannounced drills, will be held at later dates.”