Sioux County, Iowa — Last week the Iowa Senate unanimously voted to require that school officials in Iowa conduct annual drills for dealing with emergencies like natural disasters and active-shooter scenarios. But schools in Sioux County aren’t waiting for the law to go into effect before getting trained for a worse case scenario.
Deputy Waylon Pollema of the Sioux County Sheriff’s Office recently held an assembly at Western Christian High School in Hull to provide the students and teachers there with training in case of a violent intruder scenario.
The title of the training, ALICE, is an acronym for Advise, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate, and teaches a set of proactive strategies designed to increase chances of survival during a violent intruder event. The program grew out of the lessons learned in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado. Pollema says the training teaches that it’s better to do SOMETHING than to do nothing.
Deputy Pollema says Western Christian isn’t the only Sioux County school to seek his department’s ALICE training.
Pollema says the ALICE training is instruction about something they pray will never happen.
Deputy Pollema serves as the Sioux County Sheriff’s Office SRO, or School Resource Officer, and works with the schools in Sioux County on a variety of topics, including violent intruder training.
Photos from the ALICE Training assembly at Western Christian may be viewed below:
Western Christian teachers and students listen intently to ALICE Training
Deputy Waylon Pollema shows students tactics for the “Counter” portion of ALICE
Preeparing for the day we hope never comes
