Bozarth outlines Sheriff’s Department protocols in school safety

By Jennifer Wimmer

After the tragic school shooting at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday, May 24, in Uvalde, Texas, Hancock County citizens may want to know how well prepared we are if anything similar happened here. Sheriff Dale Bozarth outlines the safety protocols for Hancock County Schools in the following paragraphs.
  “We have all had active shooter training, or any threat in the school training,” he said. “The deputies, in their 40 hours of training every year, get refamiliarized with different tactics to use on active shooters, or a threat in the school. The main thing in the school, it’s just like anything else, prevention is more than anything. Once somebody enters the school, it’s already a bad situation.
Over the period of the 24 years that I’ve been Sheriff, then to now, the schools are extremely hard to get into, compared to what they used to be. You’ve got one point of entry during the day, and there’s somebody that buzzes you in, so that has helped tremendously.”
There is one resource officer already in Hancock County, and a new law has passed that requires a resource officer on each campus, he said. “We are in the early stages of hiring at least 2 more resource officers for the County, which would be working for the school, but they’ll work through us.”
The resource officers are trained just like all officers in the State of Kentucky, Bozarth said. “They have to have 40 hours of training in a year and a half, through the Academy. Most of your resource officers through the State are retired officers, and usually guys that have already worked in law enforcement for 15 to 20 years. So, they’ve already got that prior training, and then they take some SRO (School Resource Officer) training, after they are hired as a school resource officer.”
When asked what the first response would be in the event of a threat, or school shooting, Bozarth replied, “If there was a threat or a shooting at one of the schools, it would come to our 911 Dispatch, be dispatched out, and then all available officers would head there to try to eliminate that threat. Right now, we only have one resource officer. So, in our County alone, there would be one officer at the school, probably one on the road, and maybe myself or the office deputy around – so, you’re looking at the maximum of 3 to 4. Now, that’s the best case scenario, if everybody is where they are supposed to be.
If my school officer is at the high school, and my deputy is in Lewisport, doing his job…I could be on a transport, out of state, which we’re required to do. So, then state police would be committed – they’ll come and help. Where they’re coming from, you’ll never know. There might be one in Hancock County, or the nearest trooper might be in Owensboro or Hartford. Then, you’ve got city patrol officers that would join in, and there’s only one in Hawesville; there’s two in Lewisport. Of course, then dispatch would start calling the off-duty officers to be getting them in. It’s a process, but at the immediate call, you’re probably only looking at 2 or 3 people that will be showing up right away.”
He said that the ideal situation is to “get to the school as quick as you can, and eliminate the threat.” In the event that the door is locked, he says they would have to breach the door to get in. The school has a lockdown system, where they lock themselves in rooms. And, there is communication with teachers – they do have cell phones. “Used to, you went to the High School, the doors weren’t marked – that school was built in 1974. They went through the middle school and high school and changed all the doors. All the doors are numbered now – 118, 119, 120, etc…So, that helps us. As we’re going there, we’ll be getting information from people in the school, and they can tell us, ‘We’ve got kids locked in Room 121, and there’s an outside door to this room.’ So, that officer can go to Room 121, and be let in that door by a teacher. They’ll be able to see that it is one of us.
There’s a lot of ways we can get into the building in an emergency. The high school has doors all the way around it, but they’re locked. Used to, the doors weren’t numbered, so you had to know if it was the English class door, or the Biology door, etc…Now, they’ll just say, ‘We’ve got an officer at door 119, can somebody let him in that door.’ And, they can communicate that.”
When school isn’t in session, but there are other activities going on there, Bozarth said that it is still the same situation. “If you’ve got somebody that has entered the building, you’ve got to stop that threat. The school, on summer months, I’m sure they go out one door to practice. Like football, the locker rooms are outside now. They don’t come in the school. They do everything in the outside building. There’s no reason for them to enter the school then. The track teams, they probably come through one door, through the front, or the track coach lets them in from one side. It’s not monitored at every door, but it’s monitored by an adult or teacher – whoever is there with the students.”
All 4 schools have a camera, and you must buzz the button, and look at the camera before they will let you in. “If I went there, and had a fake beard on, and a big hat, they would ask me, ‘Who are you, and what do you want?’ They are not going to open that door, unless they can identify me. And, if they’re not sure, what my intentions are, they’re not going to let me in,” he said.
No one will ever have enough officers once a school shooting has started, he said. “Out of 168 hours in a week, Hancock County Sheriff’s Department has one officer out for 128 hours, of the168 hours in the week. There’s only one time we have more than one officer out at a given time, and that’s on day shift, Monday through Friday. The rest of the time, there is only one officer out, per shift. Each officer works 40 hours a week. Right now, I’ve only got 3 patrolling deputies. It takes 4 to have enough for 168 hours.
Once you get to the active threat in a school or any public building, it’s not going to be a good deal once it becomes an active threat inside the doors. It’s like the old adage, a stitch in time will save 9, prevention is everything on any threat in the school. You’ve got to prevent it from getting in the building. That’s where a lot of the key resources are put out, like locks and cameras, and that type of thing. Once they get in the school, then the lockdown procedure that the school has – different color codes that lock them in the rooms, and they try to reduce the number of exposures that the kids would have to a threat.”