Drills bring tragedy to life Teachers face to face with 'gunmen' at school in Greenwich Twp. Saturday, April 28, 2007 • By DANIEL HAUSMANN • The Express-Times GREENWICH TWP. | Police, school officials and teachers got a glimpse of a nightmare scenario Friday afternoon. Township police conducted two school shooting drills after students left for a scheduled half-day. With 120-plus teachers taking on the role of students, two officers dressed as gunmen went through the Stewartsville Middle School firing off blank rounds. A team of Greenwich and Pohatcong Township police officers then hunted through the school to take out the shooters with paintball guns. All the while "victims" lay in the hallways crying for help as shotgun rounds echoed through the corridors. Fog machines filled entire wings of the school to simulate the effect of pipe bombs going off. To put it mildly, the scene was chilling. The event has been planned since September, long before a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. The goal of the drills was to see if training sessions were meshing for police and to give teachers an opportunity to figure out how they would respond in a real situation. Washington Township Police Chief Jim McDonald observed the drill and was shouting orders to the officers as they moved through the building. He felt the officers performed well. "Hopefully, everyone in the county will do it," McDonald said. On the second drill, it took officers four minutes to respond to the school after the call went out. That was four minutes after the shooters entered the building. Four minutes after police entered the building, both shooters had been neutralized. Teachers donned hooded sweatshirts and the common dress of their students. During a debriefing session in between the two drills, there was a loud gasp when McDonald and Greenwich Chief Rich Guzzo listed the frightening decisions teachers would face in a real situation. "One of the toughest decisions you'll have is locking the classroom door, and what do you do if a student knocks at the door," McDonald said. Teachers asked police for answers on whether they should run or hunker down in a class during a real emergency. "There's not going to be an answer for every single scenario," retired Warren County Prosecutor's Office Detective Bob Barsony said. Guzzo said there is no right or wrong answer for a lot of decisions that need to be made during this kind of crisis. He said if a teacher tries to get students to run out of the building, that person could be a hero. However, if they try to run and are slaughtered, everyone would wonder what that teacher was thinking. One thing was clear, even in a drill, minutes can seem like an eternity. School receptionist Denise Snyder has only been on the job for two weeks. Her office was the first place hit by the shooters in the first drill. Police entered from the same front door moments later. "It was probably only minutes but it felt like forever," Snyder said. Office worker Donna Peters has been a district employee for seven years. She said shooting incidents are always in the back of school employees' minds. The school conducts quarterly lockdown drills. "You never know how you're going to react," Peters said. Superintendent Kevin Brennan observed the drill with thoughts of what happened at Virginia Tech fresh in his mind. Brennan's nephew was among the injured in the Norris Hall shootings. "It affected me more than I thought it would," Brennan said. Brennan attends 7 to 10 safety conferences each year; he has two on his calendar for next week. He's been an educator for 35 years, and when he started, a school shooting wasn't in his imagination. "When I became a teacher, a fire drill was the biggest thing around," Brennan said. Reporter Daniel Hausmann can be reached at 610-258-7171 or by e-mail at dhausmann@express-times.com. © 2007 The Express-Times. Used with permission.