The Company Behind America's Scariest School Shooter Drills | HuffPost

The Company Behind America's Scariest School Shooter Drills | HuffPost

The Company Behind America’s Scariest School Shooter Drills
The ALICE Training Institute wants teachers and students to confront gunmen. There’s little evidence its approach works.

This story was produced in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering guns in America.

In January, a group of teachers knelt against a wall at Meadowlawn Elementary School in Indiana while police posing as armed gunmen shot plastic pellets into their backs, causing angry, red welts. Waiting outside, the teachers’ colleagues could hear screaming, the Indiana State Teachers’ Association said, before they were “brought into the room four at a time and the shooting process was repeated.” 
After the incident, a group of the teachers considered a lawsuit. The sheriff whose team led the exercise told media his officers had stopped using airsoft guns in trainings after one of the participants complained.

“Active shooter” training like this has become more popular over the last decade — as the number of school shootings has increased, so too has the desire to prepare teachers and students to face intruders with lethal intentions.
Behind many of the drills is the ALICE Training Institute, the largest for-profit private provider of active-shooting training in the United States. ALICE operates through a “train the trainer” model — anyone can get ALICE certification after two days of in-person training and online testing. That means its precise influence over a specific drill can be difficult to determine. (ALICE also routinely trains police, like those involved in the Meadowlawn drill, who then go into schools to oversee drills.) The company claims to have trained staff at more than 5,500 school districts and at 900 institutions of higher education, with more clients signing up each day. ALICE — an acronym for alert, CONTINUE READING: The Company Behind America's Scariest School Shooter Drills | HuffPost