Tragic mass shootings at schools in recent years have left many students at Choate wondering: is our protective boarding school in small-town Connecticut safe from a shooter? Since the fall of 2016, Ms. Risa Vine has been Choate’s Director of Risk Management. Ms. Vine works closely with Choate Community Safety and the Wallingford Police Department to ensure the safety of Choate students, including in emergency situations such as an armed individual on campus or an extreme weather event.
Each year, Choate students are instructed to install an emergency app on their devices with information about what to do in the case of a crisis and numbers to call for each situation. However, this app gives no instructions as to what students should do in the case of a shooter on campus, and it provides minimal advice in the case of a suspicious person. Choate’s student handbook also does not have a section advising students on this issue. The most accessible information about what to do when an armed individual is present is an emergency procedure handout hung up on dorm common room boards and found under Fire Safety Resources on the Student Information and Forms page of the Choate portal.
With luck, an increase in Choate’s safety drills and emergency procedure awareness under the guidance of Ms. Vine will make students feel prepared in an emergency situation. In an interview, Ms. Vine said that students should be aware of their surroundings at all times and should remember the mantra, “If you see something, say something.” Ms. Vine expressed her confidence that students are safe here, with “two community safety officers patrolling campus 24/7.”
While students may have felt that the double drill on Thursday, March 22, was spurred by recent school shootingsin Florida and elsewhere, Ms. Vine clarified that Choate had planned the combined lockdown and emergency gather drills over a year ago to practice safety measures. Practicing lockdown procedures is important to ensuring the safety of the Choate community, as the campus would be put in lockdown immediately if there were a shooter on campus. In the instance of a gun threat, Ms. Vine assured that our school “would be in immediate communication with the Wallingford Police Department, which is less than a quarter mile from campus.” Choate’s mass notification system that includes loudspeaker announcements, texts, and emails to all students is effective in keeping students informed and protected in any emergency.
Choate’s peer schools, such as Exeter and Andover, have similar emergency procedures, which can be readily found in their student handbooks. Andover even has a handy acronym for their emergency response protocol: ALICE, which stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate.
In the expert words of Ms. Vine, “The most any community can do is to plan, prepare, and practice. The Choate administration is committed to making sure that we are ready for any campus crisis.”
