http://rutlandherald.com/article/20140214/THISJUSTIN/702149941
Springfield tech drill gets mistaken for real thing February 14,2014 Rutland Herald By ERIC FRANCIS CORRESPONDENT SPRINGFIELD — A planned lockdown drill at the Howard Dean Springfield Tech Center got a little too real Tuesday evening when a dozen police officers who weren’t informed in advance that it was an exercise ended up swarming into the building looking for an intruder. “I haven’t had a chance to reach out to the school officials yet to find out where the slip up was, so I don’t know their side of what went on, but obviously they had a drill and we were not aware of that drill,” Springfield Police Chief Doug Johnston said Wednesday. “It wasn’t just us that didn’t know,” Johnston emphasized. “There were people in the Tech Center who started texting about what appeared to be going on (in the hallways), thinking there was an intruder, and that’s how the police department ended up getting notified of that. People didn’t realize it was a drill versus the real thing, and that understandably caused some people to panic.” At the time, Springfield officers were discussing via their police radios a possible lockdown and what was described as a “barricaded door” to one of the Tech Center classrooms. That quickly led other police officers in Chester and Weathersfield, and several state police troopers who were also listening Tuesday, to respond to the Tech Center to back up the Springfield units beginning around 6:40 p.m. By 7:20 p.m. police had swept through the campus and determined that nothing untoward was actually taking place. “There were multiple agencies that responded and investigated,” Johnston said, noting that while the Tech Center has done drills in the past they have usually been during daylight hours and with some sort of notice to authorities. “By law the schools have to do some sort of drill every month. It can be a fire drill or now, with all the school shootings that have happened, it can be a drill to go through procedures to protect the kids from that,” Johnston explained. “Unfortunately it went the way it did,” Johnston said of Tuesday’s drill effort. He said that in the days ahead the police department plans to review what happened with school officials and ask them how the drill itself was intended to have gone in the first place, “So we can prevent this from happening like this in the future.”
Probably a call was made to the SPD and the info never reached the chief. It's happend before.
ReplyDeleteJust some more tax money wasted for no reason. C'mon man! Get with the program!
ReplyDeleteProbably the administration at the tech center dropped the ball. The entire school district administration feel they do not have to answer to anyone. We will never know why this happened because there is no accountability for their actions. We will now probably be paying for counseling for the teachers and students who were emotionally scarred from this event. School administrators get paid plenty of money, they ought to at least attempt to do their job.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing that the police chief loves nothing better than make the school districts look bad. Maybe he should get his facts right. As far as the tech center comment, again the facts were wrong, it was a CCV drill, there are no tech classes in the evening.
ReplyDeleteCCV= Community College of Vermont
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