Monthly Terror Drills Now Required By Law For Students Including Kindergarten And 1st Graders

The Intel Hub
By Alexander Higgins – Contributing Writer
September 15, 2011

Kindergarten and 1st grade students are now required by law to participate in monthly terrorism drills, including active shooter, bomb threat and evacuation drills.

I recently received my 1st grade students back to school paperwork. Going through the packet I found a letter serving notification that my son is now required by law to participate in monthly anti-terrorism drills.

In fact, after doing more research, I learned that all New Jersey schools which provide services to children from Kindergarten and up are now required by law to participate in monthly drills.

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Schools must hold the drills at least twice a year, in addition to the twice a month fire drills the following:

• Active shooter
• Evacuation (non- fire)
• Bomb threat
• and Lockdown

On top of those drills, schools will be required to also hold other security drills, which include the following:

• Shelter-in-place
• Reverse evacuation
• Evacuation to relocation site
• Testing of school’s notification system and procedures
• Testing of school’s communication system and procedures
• Tabletop exercise
• and Full scale exercise

With a Full Scale Exercise defined by Law as:

Full Scale Exercise: This is a multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional activity involving actual deployment of resources in a coordinated response as if a real incident had occurred. This exercise tests many components of one or more capabilities within emergency response and recovery, and is typically used to assess plans, procedures and coordinated response under crisis conditions.

The letter, which can be viewed here, reads as follows.

Brick Township Public Schools

 
101 Hendrickson Avenue
Brick, New Jersey 08724-2599
Telephone (732) 785-3000

Office of the Superintendent

September, 2011

Dear Parent(s) or Guardian(s):

The safety and welfare of our students and staff are our highest priority. To provide schools with the opportunity to practice emergency response procedures, it is necessary to conduct security drills as well as fire drills. The NJ Department of Educations has recently changed the guidelines concerning the frequency of these emergency drills. Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.

The school district is working closely with the Brick Township Police Department through our school resource officers to correctly implement these procedures. Our staff members have all be trained in our emergency drill procedures and are well prepared should we have to deal with a real emergency. The goals of the training drill are to improve our ability to protect students, save lives, and reduce injuries. They also allow us to evaluate our emergency operations plan and improve our response skills.

In order to protect students, in case of an actual emergency students will only be released to the parents and/or other adults listed on the emergency information sheet. Please be sure that this information is current and accurate. It is a good idea to have several trusted adults listed with the school.

This letter serves as notification that the Brick Township Public Schools will be conducting these drills in accordance with the NJ Department of Education Guidelines. The dates and times of the drills will not be announced. you would only be notified if there were a real emergency.

If you have any questions or need further information, please do not hesitate to call your child’s school office.

Sincerely,
Walter J Hrycenko

Superintendent of Schools

Past NJ Terrorism Drills Have Left Even Teacher Terrified – What Kind Of Trauma Will They Have On Children?

Here is a post on NJCSD describing a past drill:

NJ School Shooting Drill Terrifies Teachers

 
About 50 teachers at a New Jersey school experienced a terrifying moment when a shooting rampage turned out to be a drill, but the teachers didn’t know it.

It happened Aug. 28 at the Phillipsburg New Jersey Early Learning Center.

A man burst into the library and started shooting. But the gun didn’t have any bullets, just blanks.

Teachers took cover under child-sized tables, crying and trembling.

“People are crying. The girl next to me is trembling and shaking. You heard people crying. You heard other people praying. It was pretty dramatic,” one teacher said.

The school district put the drill in place to test staff readiness.

The Phillipsburg School Board heard from angry teachers and parents Monday night.

The board is reviewing the drill.

http://www.nbc10.com/news/17426916/detail.html

Test staff readiness… Unarmed teachers in a state where concealed carry isn’t allowed; they put an “active shooter” in the library and they weren’t sure what would happen? Panic, chaos, and terror are words that come to mind.

The NBC link above doesn’t work, but below is the story of another  active shooter drill. In this drill, instead of using blanks, actual guns were modified to shoot bullets containing blood colored paint.

The drill also included  a certain number of volunteer students who knew the drills being conducted. These students were shot giving bystanders and participants the “feeling” similar to the real life scenario of actually being killed by the shooter.

Watch: CBS news reports from the scene of an active shooter drill being conducted.

School shooting drill gets cops, kids on same page

 
ALBANY, Ore. – For students, fire drills and earthquake drills are simply the norm, but on Wednesday, in a sign of the times, students in Albany took part in a school shooting drill that was very intense.

This may have been only a drill, but it’s just about as real as it gets.

“Basically, the weaponry is the same weapon we carry on duty,” said Albany Police Sgt. Travis Giboney. “However, they use a marking cartridge: kind of like a paintball, except it’s a gas-driven paint pellet.”

Source:CBS Local KVAL Channel 13

Do These Terrorism Drills Do More Harm Then Good?

Many high school students could be permanently embedded with the fear that of such an incident will eventually happen to them. As the CBS video of the active shooter drill above shows, the number of casualties that occur are still extremely high.

Perhaps, some high school students may find such a drill as “fun” but there will certainly be many who are traumatized with the thought that those who died during the “drill”, could have really been killed.

For those who were  killed during the “exercise” the effect would be even more devastating. Such drills will surely have an entirely different effect on kindergarteners and 1st graders.

Given the past shootings at Columbine and other schools as well as other terrorist attacks around the world, regardless of who conducted them, I understand that the welfare and safety of my child, as well as other students, is a major concern.

However, as I pointed out above,  I also fear that these new laws will leave an entire generation of children permanently traumatized. So we must ask the question, what are the benefits and negative consequences of such drills?

They will certainly go a long way in permanently creating a mentality of hatred toward our potential and would-be enemies. However, while these drills make it clear to our children they face a real possibility of becoming a casualty of such an attack, these type of drills appear to do nothing to actually mitigate or prevent such casualties.

To the contrary, the drills instead seem to train our children to be helpless, cowering victims when faced with such a threat, which will do nothing to save their lives. While it can help police in their response times, such training can be conducted without the legal requirement that our children participate in such drills.

Furthermore, combined with other propaganda tools, such as the so-called 9/11 truth coloring book, it is almost certain that our children will be brainwashed and indoctrinated into hating Muslims, when in truth anyone from any faith could conduct such attacks.

Such drills create long lasting tensions that will take generations to undue, similar to the manner that culture of deep seeded racism has persisted in our nation for so many years.

Personally, I feel there are better alternatives than this response. It would actually make more sense to have police officers on patrol in our schools. That would actually save lives.

To the contrary, any would be terrorist planning to actually attack our schools will study these drills. They will study the trained response taken at the schools.

Then, armed with the  knowledge of the trained response,  a terrorist would use that information to increase casualties and even plan an escape route knowing what the police response will be.

For example, in the event of an actual lockdown, students would become sitting ducks by sheltering in place and cowering under their desks. Instinctive tactics like flight and dispersion would probably serve them better than hiding beneath desks while a shooter walks by and picks them off through a window.

A terrorist could also study the evacuation plan for a bomb threat and then place the bomb in the place were hundreds of students are planned to be evacuated to. Such crucial information and intelligence should be kept out of the hands of terrorists not provided to them.

Imagine if bank robbers could watch the police respond to a mock robbery of a local bank once a month. Studying such scenarios would give bank robbers valuable information on how to effectively perpetrate a robbery, while learning critical knowledge that would allow them to bypass the standard security measures and get away from the scene before the police could even respond.

Does the same logic not apply when conducting terror drills at our schools, at the expense of the emotional and psychological well-being of our children?

Another dilemma exists with this type of approach as well. So many people are concentrated in other soft targets, such as our public transportation system, and there is no systematic response and approach to attacks on those targets, so why is it necessary to subject our children to such a system?

Do we require all people who use busy train stations to participate in such drills? What about those using bus terminals or airline passengers? The list goes on and on and it would be infeasible if not impossible to implement such drills, training and response situations for all of the soft targets out there.

Read more: Five Problems with Active Shooter Lockdown Drills

How We Ended Up With Such Laws

A study titled, The Threat of Terrorism to U.S. Schools… Fact or Fiction?, gives an overview of the historical context that is being presented to law enforcement, school and legislative officials to justify the integration of such security drills into the public school systems.

The study cites terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists in Russia and Israel, which prominent eccentric speakers such as (Ret.) Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, argue will happen in the United States sooner are later.

Of course, the extremists who have launched these past attacks were trained by the United States and the CIA as part of covert operations.

In regards to the Grossman’s teachings, the Ashville Citizen-Times, a Gannett Newspaper, ran the following letter to the editor following the MSNBC’s special “Day of Destruction — Decade of War” which was ran repeatedly on 9/11 and went in-depth to Grossman’s teachings.

The nation can’t be terrified all of the time

 
I was disgusted and sickened watching MSNBC’s special “Day of Destruction — Decade of War,” hosted by Rachel Maddow and NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engle chronicling the changes made in America over the past 10 years following the surprise attacks of 9/11.

MSNBC profiled former Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a “terrorism expert” speaking at military bases, police forces and public schools preaching fear and the need for domestic policing.

Source: The Ashville Citizen Times

Indeed, I watched the same special, chalking off the program as shedding a light on the “1984 Hate Week” style government propaganda.

Here is a clip from A day of destruction, A Decade of War, looking into Grossman’s teachings which are being pushed across the nation to public employees and being uses as the justification for the laws like we see in New Jersey, which subjects children as young as 5 years old to potentially traumatizing drills which present the possibility of living the remainder of his school life deathly afraid that bad men are going to show up at his school to murder and kill him and hundreds of his school mates.

FAQ about the security drills

Alexander Higgins is an independent journalist and frequent Intel Hub contributor, he writes on his own blog, at blog.alexanderhiggins.com

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