Florida Mass School Shooting Exercise A Chilling Reality Check

CLEARWATER, FL — It was a scene from every parent's worst nightmare — law enforcement officers wearing full body armor closing in on an elementary school with weapons drawn.

Fortunately, it was only an exercise to give Pinellas County law enforcement, fire rescue personnel and school staff experience in responding to an active shooter at a school, a possibility that's all too real.

On Sunday, the country was horrified following the official release of the video from the May 24 elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which an 18-year-old gunned down 19 students and two teachers.

Then, on Monday, more than four years after the mass shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 14 students and three school staff, the penalty trial of confessed shooter Nikolas Cruz got underway.

In live video of the trial on Zoom, students gave chilling first-person accounts of the terror, chaos and carnage they witnessed as they desperately searched for hiding places or futilely held up their backpacks as shields.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, who served as chairman of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, said the two mass school shootings had one glaring similarity: law enforcement in both cases were unprepared to deal with an active shooter.

"Nobody should forget this. At Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14th, 2018, 20 years after Columbine, six years after Sandy Hook, they had not done one active shooter drill on that campus," Gualtieri said. "Nobody knew what to do, how to do it, when to do it, why to do it because there were no policies in place. People can't have a short memory about this. This has to be sustained."

As the public safety commission presented its findings during a new conference on Jan. 2, 2019, Gualtieri's words were eerily prophetic.

"The unfortunate reality is that it is going to happen again. The question is when and where," he said.

He echoed those concerns Wednesday as 15 Pinellas County law enforcement and fire rescue agencies, along with 130 actors posing as students and school staff, gathered at High Point Elementary School in Clearwater for a dress rehearsal of a production Gualtieri hopes never takes the stage.

"What we did today is something we've been wanting to do for the last couple of years but weren't able to do because of COVID — to test all the training, the policies, the protocol that we put in place in Pinellas County over the last few years to address an active assailant situation, especially at a school," he said.

During an active shooter event involving multiple law enforcement agencies, Gualtieri said everyone must be on the same page.

"It is essential training for law enforcement agencies and other first responders to work together, to work quickly to neutralize the threat and begin to help the injured," he said.

"We needed to do this to test it and determine areas where we're good and areas where there's room for improvement, find the areas where we have holes, where we have vulnerabilities. That, for me, is the overarching reason for doing something like this," Gualtieri said.

In the mass shooting scenario, a woman whose husband is a teacher at the school suspects him of having an affair with another teacher.

"She was upset and, as we know, the schools in Pinellas County have single points of entry and the only place she could get in was through the front office area," Gualtieri said. "She arrived. The gate was open, but it was staffed as it should be. She barged her way through after the staff wouldn't let her in. She had a gun. She went to the classroom. She engaged her husband, there was an oral argument, and she shot him. Then, she went throughout the school, shooting kids and staff members."

In the scenario, the shooter made her way to the playground, where she continued shooting staff and students, and tried to get into another classroom but, true to their training, the staff refused to let her in. So, she headed to another building, where she barricaded herself inside.

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Largo police were the first to arrive on the scene and, as they were trained, formed a "contact team" so no officer entered the school building alone, Gualtieri said. Contact teams from other law enforcement agencies soon followed.

One of the contact teams made its way to the building where the woman was barricaded and exchanged gunfire with her. She was "killed" during the encounter.

Other contact teams remained on alert, questioning people and searching classrooms, "because we still didn't know if there might be other shooters," Gualtieri said.

In the exercise, rescue teams made up of law enforcement, firefighters and paramedics were formed to evacuate the actors through classroom windows and other exit points. The students and staff were then ushered onto buses and taken to a "reunification center" outside the danger zone.

Other rescue teams took the injured to a "casualty collection point" inside the school, where paramedics began life-saving measures before moving them to a triage center outside.

Pinellas County's newly appointed School Superintendent Kevin Hendrick said it was unnerving watching the scenario play out, knowing it could actually happen.

"These types of situations, we all fear them, we don't want to see them in Pinellas County schools, but we must be prepared," he said.

For purposes of training, Hendrick said the school staff wasn't briefed beforehand on the scenario.

"We went in surprised, so we could react accordingly," he said.

Ideally, Hendrick said, the school district wants to prevent these scenarios from ever taking place.

"We have worked closely with the sheriff and his team on threat assessments, on 'See Something, Say Something,' on the Sandy Hook Promise Act, Fortify Florida and all the resources that we have so we never get to this point."

Gualtieri said he and his staff will study videotapes of the exercise and develop an after-action report to use for the next exercise, something he plans to make a regular event.

Overall, though, he said he was pleased with what he saw.

"I think it was a success today," he said.