| BELLEVILLE - Students at Governor French Academy spent Thursday afternoon giving the police a hard time. |
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| But it was only a test. |
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| They were role playing in a police training drill designed to give metro-east law enforcement officers a feel for responding to violent situations that might occur in a school setting. |
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| The training is one of about 300 annual practice sessions conducted by the Southern Illinois Law Enforcement Commission, a consortium of police and sheriffs departments from seven nearby counties. |
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| The private kindergarten-through-12th grade academy invited the group to practice on its Belleville campus to help the police with their training and also to assist the school with their own response readiness plan. |
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| The school is one of the first in the area to react to a new state law requiring all public and private schools to conduct school safety drills and review school emergency and crisis response plans. The School Safety Drill Act became effective June 1. |
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| "This is for us as a staff to be best prepared should we have some kind of incident in our school," said Director of Development Paul Seibert. "If you go through simulations, you will perform better in a real incident." |
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| Earlier this year, Governor French also participated in a project that provides police agencies with detailed interior and exterior layouts of the school in case of an incident like the one that occurred in Beslan, Russia, in September when militants seized a school and killed more than 150 people, many of them children. |
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| Director Philip Paeltz said that incident sparked his interest in getting involved in the drill. |
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| "When we turned to the state school board for advice (to deal with a similar situation), they told us we need to hunker down and wait for the police," he said. "We thought that would make us targets." |
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| Paeltz said that by participating in the practice exercise, students and staff at the school will have a better idea of how to get themselves out of those types of scenarios and not be victimized. |
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| On Thursday, about 50 students, parents and staff members volunteered to become victims in a hostage takeover. The trainers asked the actors to do their best to make the setting as real as possible. |
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| "This is one situation when you're in school, and we're going to ask you to yell and scream," said one of the trainers, Caseyville Police Officer Frank Moore. "We're not going to make it easy for them. We're going to put them through some stress, more stress than they might find on the job." |
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| Two trainers served as the "bad guys" in different scenarios throughout the day. The nine police officers who were being trained used their own weapons, minus the bullets, to subdue the "suspects." Following each scenario, the police officers went over how they handled the situation and what they could have done better. |
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| After being part of a three-man team that stopped a gun-toting bad guy from taking a class hostage, Dan Murphy, a police officer for Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, said that the drill was "as close to real as you can get." |
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| "Whether it's real or practice, your blood pressure goes up and your heart starts racing," he said. |
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| The volunteers were a part of that adrenaline rush as well. Amid the gun shots, yelling and commotion, 9-year-old Cody Hughes found the drill to be "sometimes scary, sometimes fun." |
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| But that didn't stop Cody and his classmates from taking the task at hand very seriously. |
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| "This is more business than fun because it helps the police with their jobs and it could save lives." |
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| Copyright (c) 2005 The Belleville News-Democrat |