Run, hide, fight: HutchCC prepares for active shooter training on Wednesday

By Jolie Shultz
Editor in Chief
IG: @jolie.rebecca

Run. Hide. Fight.

Those three words are a huge part of the new emergency operations plan at Hutchinson Community College. Another part of the plan is drills, including an active shooter drill at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

“We want our students to be prepared for this,” said Dana Hinshaw, Executive Director of Student Affairs and Campus Safety. “It’s not just about locking down in the event that there’s an armed intruder. So it’s not just about ‘Hey, we’re going to practice a lockdown’. We’re going to practice, if there were an armed intruder on campus what would we do?”

The new emergency operations plan for HutchCC was compiled after a meeting with several law enforcement officers in April.

Along with the new plan, HutchCC got a new notification program through RAVE Mobile Safety. The new system has been working better than the old system, which failed to send timely and accurate messages to students and faculty during a bomb threat on Feb. 12..

“The emergency preparedness director from Reno County came to a meeting with us with the two lieutenants that run the police department’s SWAT team,” Hinshaw said. “So we all met and talked about the emergency plan that we had in place at that point. And emergency operation director for Reno County said, ‘You have procedures. You don’t really have a plan.’ So we really started thinking about that and thought ‘we need to do something different.’”

The plan in its entirety is made of scenarios for all kinds of different emergencies that may happen on HutchCC’s campus.

“I want to do four trainings, not just on this, but four emergency trainings each year,” Hinshaw said. “So two of those this year will be armed intruders. We’re going to do a fire drill next month where it’s not about testing the system, it’s about testing our people. Like, are we paying attention and do we realize that, you know, like are we really leaving and if there’s an obstacle in the way, like what’s our second route, those kinds of things. So I mean it’s really about having our staff and students being prepared.”

Some HutchCC students are used to these kinds of drills and support the decision to drill on campus.

“I think it’s good that they are actively training to be prepared for the possibility of an active shooter,” said Matthew Drach, a Nickerson sophomore. “So I believe that training can make someone better. It engraves certain procedures in your mind. During a fear induced situation like an active shooting, training can help students and faculty stay calm and focused by using these procedures despite all the fear and panic. There will always be fear in said situations no matter how much training is done, but the parodical and procedures will be on the top of your mind instead of the confusion fear can cause.”

As for the impending active shooter training on Wednesday, Hinshaw described the procedures.

“The police department has a person that is kind of their shooter,” Hinshaw said. “And so he will have law enforcement officers that are with him. And they all are wearing high-(visible) vests. And they’ll have a sign out that says, and we’ve sent information out. There’ll be information on the radio. We’re sending information to our students. Because we don’t want anybody to be surprised by this.”

The law enforcement officers will be using blanks during the shooting to emulate an auditory cue of what would be happening in the event of an armed intruder. After roughly a minute, all students and faculty members will receive a Dragon Alert.

The Dragon Alert will clarify that this occasion is a drill. It will specify which building the drill will be taking place in. The alert will also include the phrase “Run. Hide. Fight”.

The active shooter training will take place in one of the buildings on campus, the exact one hasn’t been disclosed. The drill is expected to last 15 minutes.

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