The urgent yet collected voice of assistant principal Lisa Nieuwenhuizen projected through the school intercom at 2:40 p.m. to announce the first Alert Lockdown Inform Counter Evacuate (ALICE) drill of the 2019-20 school year Oct. 8. As Nieuwenhuizen declared the simulated active shooter was in the Main Commons, students within a safe distance poured into the hallways and hurried to the nearest exits.EEE Counselor James Meyer, who was responsible for directing all students in the EEE room out of the building and to safety, said there was an exorbitant amount of traffic exiting the East Atrium doors in the studies wing. 

“There is in fact a huge amount of traffic out of those doors and almost none out of the doors that surround the entryway. That could be used to help defuse the mass of people that come out of those doors,” Meyer said. “The second problem with those doors is, as you know, as you run out of those doors you hit those huge stone benches almost immediately, and so the crowd that came out of those doors has to leap over those benches, which is kind of ridiculous, or has to quickly turn 90 degrees, otherwise you end up piling up there. So we have to continue to learn how our building works in situations like those and adjust where we advise people to exit.” 

Advanced Placement literature students react to the ALICE drill during fourth block Oct. 8. After hearing the announcement over the intercom, students laughed and joked. Audio by Bailey Stover.

After hearing the ALICE drill announcement, Students in fourth hour Advanced Placement statistics with teacher Kevin Taylor exit the classroom and evacuate through the sole exterior door in the math wing.  Video by Anna Xu.

Assistant principal Dr. Tim Baker, who coordinates the ALICE drill at RBHS, said he discussed the issue of overcrowding in the studies wing at the debriefing among administrators directly following the drill. He said identifying possible safety concerns is a priority of the simulation, and this drill revealed several places for improved preparedness. 

“Four classrooms going to a door [in the math wing], it is a lot different than four classrooms coming to a door upstairs.That’s the first time that I’ve seen that happen where we have that big of a bottleneck in that one particular door,” Baker said. “We’re having that discussion we already debriefed about this with administrator afterwards, and studies teachers in general may need to err on the side of barricading over evacuating unless they know they’re far enough away, right. . . I’m not saying they made a mistake. They were just a victim of circumstance, and, let’s face it, that area of the building has the most kids. So they just got tied up, which is unfortunate because if the bad guy was truly a bad guy, he would have had some bad things happen.”RBHS performs three ALICE drills per school year, one more than CPS mandates . In each active shooter simulation, Dr. Baker selects one staff member to move through the halls, test door knobs and act as the armed threat. In this case Dr. Baker chose  Andrew Bunk, a paraprofessional. Nieuwenhuizen monitors the simulated shooter via cameras and tells students and teachers whether and where the threat has moved. Dr. Baker carefully refers to the role as the “bad guy” as opposed to “active shooter” to be mindful of student anxiety.“I always use the term ‘bad guy’ because sometimes I’m not talking to high school teachers and students. Sometimes I’m talking to elementary teachers and students and talking to preschool,” Dr. Baker said. “I [say bad guy] because it’s not lost on me that we’re still talking about kids, and let’s not forget about those kids that are not quite as cognitively advanced. Everybody knows what bad guy means.”

When Dr. Nieuwenhuizen first announced the drill, she repeated “this is a drill” several times but did not give the location of the simulated shooter until a separate announcement later. Meyer found this pause perplexing and was not sure whether to wait for the shooter’s location, run or lock the doors.

Students in fourth hour Yearbook class clamor as they hear the ALICE drill announcement. They proceed to follow a substitute teacher out of the classroom and to the nearest exit, the west doors. Audio by Amira McKee.

“In recent drills I feel that [location] information has been front loaded. As the drill is being announced, we are told where the person is. In this situation, we were told several times that the drill had started but were not told until we were halfway out the building or at least until we were halfway wondering whether we should run or barricade in place,“ Meyer said. “That caused me to realize that the decision about whether to fight or flee is one that may not happen immediately in the case of an actual shooting. And as such, what you hope is a black and white decision when the time comes may in fact be really gray.”

Junior Josh Froidl was working in the EEE room when Nieuwenhuizen announced the drill and exited through the crowded East Atrium doors. He said it didn’t interrupt his work because he was on AUT, but it was a surprise.

“You can never really predict what’s going to happen, but it is a method, and it’s nice to have some form of preparedness,” Froidl said. “You won’t know in a real situation so being able to deal with surprise is why [students don’t know about the drills until they happen].”

CPS high school ALICE drills are more realistic than those done in CPS middle schools and elementary schools, Dr. Baker said. The reason for this disparity is to prepare for the increased risk of shooting in high schools, Counselor Dr. Jordan Alexander said .

“In middle schools and elementary schools, they don’t usually do an active shooter drill like we do in high school.We have an actual person coming around and checking doors, partly to make sure we are sensitive to those who have experienced trauma in their past and being very sensitive to not wanting to retraumatize students by having a similation that is too real for them,” Dr. Alexander said. “We do want to make it as real as we can for high school students so that they know that to do if,heaven forbid, a real intruder situation did occur.”

Despite concerns from some students and staff, Dr. Baker strives to balance realism with sensitivity when planning ALICE drills. He said the current generation of students is uniquely prepared to handle such stress.

“I’m not even 50 years old yet. I’m only 49, and whenever I was a kid going through school, there was no such thing as these drills,” Dr. Baker said. “There was no such thing as an active shooter drill. . . We didn’t do this kind of stuff, so preparing the adults for this is hard. You just you grew up with it, so I find you all to be much more resilient.”

Do you think ALICE drills serve as sufficient preparation for the threat of school shootings?