Safe and secure schools are key for our first responders with the City of Baytown and Goose Creek Consolidated Independent School District. Baytown’s Office of Emergency Management and GCCISD hosted an active shooter training exercise earlier this week.
Members from the Baytown Police and Fire Departments joined together with GCCISD police officers to discuss how they can improve joint response times during a critical crisis, while keeping the public informed. This training was requested by Baytown Police Chief John Stringer before the Uvalde school shooting, but the recent incident created a more immediate need for the training.
Chief Stringer said, “This multi-agency exercise was conducted to test response plans, policies, and procedures to ensure responding agencies have a unified response with clear expectations should an active shooter event ever occur.”
He added, “This gave us the opportunity to share lessons learned to continually improve our unified response.”
And this type of response training between the City and GCCISD is far from over.
Chief Stringer said, “This was the just the first phase of future exercises, a foundation for a full-scale drill that will include the agencies represented in this training as well as additional partners from the area.”
David Alamia, Emergency Management Coordinator for the City of Baytown, called the training a success. He said, “The joint exercise between the city and school district was solid in terms of demonstrating how multiple agencies and key partners can come together to provide a fully-integrated and unified response to a complex situation like an active-shooter incident on campus.”
Chief Stringer agreed, saying, “As a parent of school-aged children, I feel much better knowing that we have a unified response to protect our children in schools.”
Thanks to GCCISD Police Chief Davis Smith, GCCISD Chief Operations Officer Dr. Anthony Price, Baytown Fire Chief Kenneth Dobson and others for making this training possible.