John Leyba / Special to The Colorado Sun
The youngest students learn to help their teacher barricade a door. Middle-schoolers work on how to join forces to pin a gunman to the ground during a struggle, to spread their body weight, like wrestlers, across an arm or a leg.
And in high school, training in how to fight off an active shooter includes a lesson in firearms — how to recognize an opportunity to get away or fight back when a shooter is reloading his weapon.
The student trainings, including one planned near Denver this summer, mark a new era in school safety, a shift beyond the “shelter-in-place” and even the “hide, run, fight” drills that are common at schools across the country. The message — reinforced in the past month by the national praise for two students killed while taking down school shooters — is that sometimes kids have to take matters into their own hands.
But while young victims are publicly celebrated, child psychologists are raising alarms. They caution against glamorizing young people’s deaths like cartoon superheroes and worry about the risks involved in training students to confront a shooter.
Still, the trainings are taking hold.
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