KILLINGLY, Conn. — A group of Connecticut state troopers is now newly trained on how to respond to active school threats.
The three-day training took place at Harvard H. Ellis Technical School in Danielson, culminating with scenarios and run-throughs Wednesday afternoon.
“All those tactics were combined into a scenario and the scenario was responding to an active aggressor,” said Sgt. Christine Jeltema with the Connecticut State Police.
The training included a classroom portion on best practices, updates in tactical response and lessons learned from other school events, and scenarios.
“The classroom portion, obviously, is the crawl phase, learning the tactics or refreshing the tactics, going through the different tactics,” Jeltema said. “Then bringing everything combined together with the sounds, the role-players, getting that stress level up so that if they were to respond to an incident like this, their body in their minds and their brain has already done this before.”
Connecticut State Police say it’s important for these run-throughs to be as realistic as possible to prepare troopers.
“When they are encountered with a situation like this, they have the tools in their toolbox and they know how to respond so that they can save lives,” continued Jeltema. “We know time saves lives.”
Local high school students participated as actors in the scenarios, while both troopers and the fake shooter used simulation bullets.
“If there were a chance that the troopers did something that was not per tactics, they potentially could have gotten shot,” Jeltema explained.
After each run-through, participants did an after-action review with the instructor.
“Get them somewhere away from the shooter, away from all that trauma, right? We got to think about this after the fact,” the instructor said to trainees Wednesday. “We don't want to expose ourselves to it as much as we need to, but I care more about the kids. That's a lot of trauma that they’ll be dealing with. Get them up, get them out.”
“Oftentimes, when you're in situations like this, and you're going through the training, you think you're doing what you're supposed to be doing and then having that outside or even video of it, you're like, ‘Oh man, I did miss that part,’” Jeltema said. “That’s really important for us.”
This training was conducted by the state police’s Emergency Services Unit, which has trained more than 8,000 civilians and 2,500 recruits and troopers since 2016.
Around 30 troopers completed the training Wednesday afternoon, and state police say the Emergency Services Unit is already planning more trainings this year, hoping to eventually refresh all troops in the future.
Emma Wulfhorst is a political reporter for FOX61 News. She can be reached at ewulfhorst@fox61.com. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Have a story idea or something on your mind you want to share? We want to hear from you! Email us at newstips@fox61.com
HERE ARE MORE WAYS TO GET FOX61 NEWS
Download the FOX61 News APP
iTunes: Click here to download
Google Play: Click here to download
Stream Live on ROKU: Add the channel from the ROKU store or by searching FOX61.
Steam Live on FIRE TV: Search ‘FOX61’ and click ‘Get’ to download.