I rather have my kid go to a schol like this rather than to one where they just sit there and pray somebody else will save them……….
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Students taught to fight back if a gunman invades classroom:
Date: Oct 14, 2006 12:37 PM
PUBLICATION: The Ottawa Citizen
DATE: 2006.10.14
EDITION: Final
SECTION: News
PAGE: A10
BYLINE: Jeff Carlton
SOURCE: The Associated Press
DATELINE: BURLESON, Texas
ILLUSTRATION: Photo: CNN / Rather than wait for a gunman to hold
studentshostage, or worse, kill them, Robin Browne, a major in the
British army reserve, is teaching students in Texas to take on the
attacker ‘by picking up anything and everything and throwing it at the
head and body.’
WORD COUNT: 490

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Students taught to fight back if a gunman invades classroom: Texas city
first in U.S. to use fight-back tactics that critics say risk getting
children killed

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BURLESON, Texas – Youngsters in a suburban Fort Worth school district
are being taught not to sit there like good boys and girls with their
hands folded if a gunman invades the classroom, but to rush him and hit
him with everything they got — books, pencils, legs and arms.

“Getting under desks and praying for rescue from professionals is not a
recipe for success,” said Robin Browne, a major in the British army
reserve and an instructor for Response Options, the company providing
the training to the Burleson schools.

That kind of fight-back advice is all but unheard of among schools, and
some fear it will get children killed.

But school officials in Burleson said they are drawing on the lessons
learned from a string of disasters such as Columbine in 1999 and the
Amish schoolhouse attack in Pennsylvania earlier this month.

The school system in the working-class suburb of about 26,000 is
believed to be the first in the United States to train all its teachers
and students to fight back, Maj. Browne said.

He recommends students and teachers “react immediately to the sight of a
gun by picking up anything and everything and throwing it at the head
and body of the attacker and making as much noise as possible. Go toward
him as fast as we can and bring them down.”

Response Options trains students and teachers to “lock on to the
attacker’s limbs and use their body weight,” Maj. Browne said.

Everyday classroom objects, such as paperbacks and pencils, can become
weapons.

“We show them they can win,” he said. “The fact that someone walks
into
a classroom with a gun does not make them a god. Five or six
seventh-grade kids and a 95-pound art teacher can basically challenge,
bring down and immobilize a 200-pound man with a gun.”

The fight-back training parallels the change in thinking that has
occurred since Sept. 11, 2001, when actions aboard United Flight 93 made
it clear that the usual advice during a hijacking — don’t try to be a
hero, and no one will get hurt — no longer holds. Flight attendants and
passengers are now encouraged to rush the cockpit.

Hilda Quiroz of the National School Safety Centre, a nonprofit advocacy
group in California, said she knows of no other school system in the
U.S. that is offering fight-back training, and found the strategy at
Burleson troubling.

“If kids are saved, then this is the most wonderful thing in the world.
If kids are killed, people are going to wonder who’s to blame,” she
said. “How much common sense will a student have in a time of panic?”

Stacy Vaughn, the president of the Parent-Teacher Organization at
Norwood Elementary in Burleson, supports the program. “I feel like our
kids should be armed with the information that these types of
possibilities exist.”

But Terry Grisham, spokesman for the Tarrant County Sheriff’s
Department, said he, too, had concerns, though he had not seen details
of the program.

“You’re telling kids to do what a tactical officer is trained to do, and
they have a lot of guns and ballistic shields,” he said. “If my school
was teaching that, I’d be upset, frankly.”