By ALEXIA ROCKEY

On October 27, a mass shooting occurred at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Eleven people were killed and seven were injured. The victims all had one thing in common: they were all Jewish.

The hateful crime was committed by 46-year-old Robert Gregory Bowers. His motive was said by police to have been “antisemitism,” or hostility and prejudice towards Jews. His selfish act inflicted pain onto the family members of the victims. The victims went to church that day to worship, not knowing that their lives would be taken because of their religion.

The Squirrel Hill neighborhood in Pittsburgh is one of the largest predominantly Jewish neighborhoods in the United States and has historically been the center of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, with 26 percent of the city’s Jewish population living in the area. Although Squirrel Hill has a low crime rate, the recent massacre proved to be the deadliest attack on Jewish people in all of history in the United States. Crimes like the Pittsburgh shooting prove that no group of people are truly safe.

Since the incident, churches in Pittsburgh have been closely patrolled by state police, and school districts have been changing their ways of handling situations like these.

As a school district, every student at Bellefonte Area High School deserves to feel safe while they are learning during the day. Monthly drills and lockdowns benefit the school by providing students with information on how they can improve their chances of surviving an attack.

School Resource Officer Mike Lyons reflected on the day of the Pittsburgh shooting. “Any time we have a shooting, it’s an awful thing. Especially this one because it’s a senseless act. I’m not sure what you could do to prevent these things. It’s something now that has become an epidemic. Hopefully, we can grow from these types of events. We learn how to better deal with these things just in case you’re faced with [a situation like] that,” he said.

Officer Lyons is trained to teach ALICE training and discuss drill and lockdown plans. He is hopeful that students will know what to do when they are faced with situations like school shootings. In today’s society, there is no certainty that students in our school are completely safe.

Officer Lyons explained the components of ALICE training and how often drills and lockdowns should be practiced in our school.

“ALICE stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate. We are in the ALICE training and we do barricade drills, counter drills, and evacuation drills. They are the three components of ALICE [training]. Hopefully, if the students ever get into that situation, that they know what to do. It depends on what is going to kick in, whether that be ‘fight’ or ‘flight./ There are two different kinds of people, and hopefully your ‘fight’ will kick in. I would like to do [drills] once every month, but it’s not always possible. Right now, the way that society is, doing the ALICE drill is more important than a fire drill.”

He felt that these drills should be a vital part of the students’ lives because the drills can prepare students for not only a shooting in school, but in public as well.

“Drills are kind of like homework–you have to practice for the test that you’re going to take later on. The more we do these drills, the more you’re used to knowing what you have to do. It’s like your second instinct. Once you get into that high-stress situation, you’ll automatically know what to do, and you don’t have to think [too much] about what you’re doing next. These high-stress situations don’t have to be in school; they can be in public too,” Officer Lyons said.

ALICE training affects our students and teachers, but do the students have a say on the drills and lockdowns? Officer Lyons discusses the fact that our school has a Student Safety Committee, and they have a say on some aspects of ALICE. The committee’s ideas are heard and their input is considered to the training.

“We have a Student Safety Committee here. They give us a lot of input on certain safety things around the school. So, we can get ideas from them, which is very helpful. The say that they do have is whether they want to barricade or evacuate [for a certain drill in a month.] It’s usually up to Mr. Park, the vice-principal for eleventh and twelfth grade, [to decide which drill we do] because he handles all of the safety drills. His duty is to plan the drills and then set them up,” Officer Lyons said.

ALICE training is an important part to our school because it can help the students in our school on a long-term basis. These drills and lockdowns that come with ALICE training prepare our students for unsettling events that could occur, which makes them vital to the students’ lives. Shootings have become a part of the American society, and we have to live with the fact that our country is not perfect. In the meantime, we can prepare ourselves for the unknown.