An armed gunman walks into the lobby of a local school with one goal in mind: to take lives. It’s becoming an all-too-familiar scenario nationwide.

County schools have plans in place to respond. Officers from the county Sheriff’s Department and Grand Traverse Band, in conjunction with the county office of Emergency Management, have also been preparing for the possibility of an incident by working with county schools since last fall to create lockdown drills.

The exercises are the product of a state law, signed last year by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, which requires all schools to conduct two “lockdown” drills in addition to two weather-related drills and two fire drills annually.

Tom Skowronski, county director of emergency management, provides a fictitious set of circumstances that staff and students must respond to.

“There are different plans for action for internal and external threats,” said Skowronski, who set the stage for a drill Friday at Glen Lake School. The mock event was scheduled prior to the murder of 32 college students at Virginia Technological University April 16.

“A disgruntled parent was armed and on his way,” he said.

Once notified of the threat, schools are to go on “lockdown,” meaning all exterior doors are locked. From there teachers lead students to a designated “place of safety” that will vary depending upon their location within the facility.

Safe havens out of sight of windows and doors, such as a supply closet, are preferred

“All our schools have interior locks on the doors, if an intruder were to make it to the hallway,” Skowronski said. “There were no locks on the interior doors at Virginia Tech.”

Doors are locked, lights turned off and all is silent. Students and staff are told to remain in hiding until given the “all clear” from their superintendent or a police officer.

Kayleigh Blackburn, a senior, was working as an office aide when the lockdown was announced.

“They didn’t want anyone to be really, really frightened,” she said, citing the Virginia Tech shooting. “So they let us
know that it would be happening sometime that morning.”

Blackburn and secretaries Jan Novak and Lynn Milliron took cover in an undisclosed location within the high school office.

“It was a lot more alarming … the reality that we were in lockdown,” she said, adding that the exercise didn’t take nearly as long as she had anticipated. “We waited there until the police came to let us out.”

After students were dismissed from classes Friday Sergeant Mike Lamb of the Leelanau County Sheriff’s Department explained what officers would be doing while teachers were seeking safety with students.

“Our job is to find the threat and (eliminate) it,” Lamb told the teachers while he displayed an M-16 rifle. With weapons drawn, Lamb, Undersheriff Scott Wooters, Deputy Duane Wright, and Tribal Police Chief Chris Bailey and his brother, Bob, from the Leelanau County Sheriff’s Department demonstrated a formation that would be used by officers in searching for intruders within the building.

Skowronski said the location of the schools predicate how officers respond.

“The way we’d respond to an incident in Suttons Bay (within a village) would be different than what we’d do at Glen Lake, which is unique because it’s in the middle of the boondocks.”

Elsewhere in the county, Norris Elementary has completed three lockdowns similar to the one carried out last week at Glen Lake. Northport has had two, on Oct. 13 and March 6. St. Mary had one drill on April 19, and Suttons Bay completed exercises on Nov. 3 and March 16.

County schools are also taking other steps to ensure student safety, such as locking doors that lead directly to classrooms after school is in session. Beginning this week, only two entrances will be open to the public at Glen Lake during the school day. Both are adjacent to administrative offices, where staff is available to monitor those coming and going.

Blackburn, whose days at Glen Lake are numbered in anticipation of her June 3 graduation, said she had never thought about how her school would respond if threatened.

“Nobody thinks it would happen at their school,” she said. “Especially here at Glen Lake in the middle of nowhere.”