Nashville shooting spurs U.S. schools to review security — again By Reuters

By Julia Harte and Sharon Bernstein

(Reuters) -Security consultant Brink Fidler led the staff at the Covenant School in Nashville through mass shooter training in early 2022, teaching them escape and lockdown skills and medical trauma preparation.

On Wednesday, two days after a 28-year-old former student opened fire inside the private Christian academy, Fidler said he saw signs that the teachers had implemented his advice.

Walking through the grade school with police detectives, Fidler noted that teachers had covered the windows and turned out the lights. He saw a medical bag on a desk, ready to be used. Those who could safely get out had evacuated with their students, while others appeared to have locked down and hidden from the shooter.

“They followed every protocol we talked about,” Fidler, a former police officer, said in a telephone interview after helping police understand what preparations the school had taken. “They were saving those kids’ lives.”

Despite Covenant School’s planning, the assailant entered the stately stone building by shooting the glass out of several doors. The attacker then killed three 9-year-old students and three adults before police stopped the assault by fatally shooting the 28-year-old.

The rampage has U.S. educators grappling once again with how to bolster their defenses against such a threat, particularly at smaller independent schools often viewed as havens of safety.

It was a reminder that any campus could be the target of gun violence, spurring educators around the country to review security protocols and try to reassure parents.

“There’s been a sense of, ‘Those problems don’t seem to happen in our types of schools,’ and (Monday) shattered that,” said Sean Corcoran, head of school at Brainerd Baptist School, an elementary school of 330 students attached to a church in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Corcoran said Brainerd’s glass doors were coated in bullet-resistant laminate; it holds several active shooter drills a year; and the local police station can access security camera feeds during emergencies. The school is also installing panic buttons.

But he said the Covenant School shooting exposed how deadly such attacks can be even when school leaders “did everything…