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March 28, 2024 12:58 pm
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MVCEAB Set On Beefing Up School Security

By VERNON ROBISON

Moapa Valley Progress

What is the right thing to do if you find yourself in an active shooter situation with a classroom full of school children? Do you get everyone to huddle in a corner and hide? Or do you get poised for a fight? How can anyone prepare for such a terrifying situation?

These questions and more have been especially top-of-mind lately for many local teachers and school administrators. They have also been pushed to the front of the agenda for the Moapa Valley Community Education Advisory Board (MVCEAB).

Members of the MVCEAB, an appointed group of local education advocates, are determined to get answers to these questions, and more, for local teachers.

The MVCEAB will be holding its first meeting of the school year on Friday, September 13 at 9:30 am at Moapa Valley High School. School safety is the major agenda item for that meeting. All of the public is invited to come and provide input.

At the meeting, the board will be pushing to bring expert tactical training to teachers and administrators in Moapa Valley schools.
“I think that we are all feeling an urgency to get this knowledge and skillset to our teachers right now, as soon as possible,” said MVCEAB President Wendy Mulcock.
Mulcock lives right next door to the Logandale Stake Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She said that she had been stunned and horrified by the recent arson attempt on that building. From that news, it wasn’t far to imagine something much worse happening, she said.

“If someone among us here in the community can be so angry, isolated and hopeless that they would hatch a plot to destroy property in that way, it is really just a small step for someone to move to harming not just property, but people,” Mulcock said. “That would be tragic and we have to do all we can to prevent something like that.”

In recent weeks, MVCEAB leaders have been made aware of a resource that could help local teachers be more prepared. A project called Fight Back Nation, led by former Las Vegas Metro SWAT officer Dave Acosta, brings tactical training on what to do in an active shooter situation to teachers in their own work environment: the classroom.

Last week Mulcock, along with other MVCEAB members and the three local school principals, travelled to American Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas to observe Acosta and his team provide this training program to a group of teachers there.

Acosta has quickly gained some notoriety for what he does. He and his team shows up in person to the school. Then they interact with teachers in a series of intense, hands-on training sessions.

The program uses the generally accepted “Run, Hide, Fight” response, taught to teachers in many public school systems, as merely a jumping off point. But it fills in a lot of the fuzzy details, focusing a lot of attention on the last component: Fight.

“The concepts of Run and Hide are virtually self explanatory,” says Acosta in an information video posted on his website at fightbacknation.org. “However, the Fight portion of the plan is vague and open for interpretation. No one really knows what that means. Without guidance or an established protocol, this becomes very subjective.”

Acosta’s program instructs teachers how to make a decisive plan and execute a surprise attack on their attacker.
“Do nothing (in a closed environment) and die,” Acosta says. “Jump into action and fight for your life, and you have a significant chance of not only surviving, but winning!”

The program spends multiple hours over three different sessions to teach these principles in detail. But it also has the teachers physically engaged in acting out the scenarios and getting experience disarming an attacker. All of this is done in the teacher’s own classroom, in the very surroundings where the incident could actually take place.

“It was powerful!” Mulcock said after observing the program being taught. “It was amazing to see the energy that builds in the room as teachers actually realize that they could do this. For example, to see this little woman, an elementary school teacher, snap into action and take down these big guys and disarm them, it was pretty impressive!”

Mulcock said that the local principals were instantly sold on the benefits of the program.
“They all said ‘yes, yes! We want this to happen in our schools!’” Mulcock said.

But the bigger challenge may come in selling the idea to the central administrators at Clark County School District (CCSD). Last year, the MVCEAB School Safety committee headed up by local mom Teresa Holzer, presented a plan to team up with local Metro officers in providing some basic tactical training to local teachers.

“We kind of got shot down pretty quick on that one,” Holzer said. “The CCSD folks told us that they had their own police force with its own training and that we couldn’t be bringing in outside training on to school property. But that is as far as it got. Our teachers still haven’t been trained sufficiently.”

The cost of the full Fight Back program would be $7500 to train local teachers in three sessions. Mulcock said that MVCEAB has already approached CCSD officials about the possibility of bringing the program to Moapa Valley schools. The response indicated a general openness to try it as a ‘pilot project’ for the district.

“So we may be making some progress there,” Mulcock said. “We have gone from ‘no way, no how’ to them using words like ‘pilot program’. That is encouraging.”

Mulcock said that she is hoping that Friday’s MVCEAB meeting will engage the community to drive this request further home to district officials.
“We’d love to see people come to the meeting ready to engage on this,” she said.
But even if the CCSD brass doesn’t agree to supply funding needed for the program, the MVCEAB is still not giving up on it, Mulcock said.

“We feel strongly that this training needs to happen and we are moving forward with it,” Mulcock said. “I guess we feel like this is important enough that it may have to be asking forgiveness for it later rather than getting permission now.”

In any case, Mulcock feels that the least of the worries is coming up with the $7500 in funding for the program.
“If the issue on this ends up being about money, I think we can make it happen,” Mulcock said. “I think that if we can get the public aware of what we are trying to do, we can get it done.”

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