School officials facing the future...

Cecilia — The orange gun gives it away. The exercise is scary enough without using real guns. Heart rates climb and palms sweat. That’s part of the training.

An “Active School Shooter Functional Exercise” was held Saturday, March 1, at Cecilia Primary School. The exercise was conducted by the St. Martin Sheriff’s Office in conjunction with the St. Martin School Board, Acadian Ambulance, St. Martin Parish Fire District, and St. Martin Parish Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

“With the increasing incidents of school shootings across the nation, Parish agencies realize the need to test and evaluate their response plans and efforts,” said SMSO spokeswoman Maj. Ginny Higgins.

In addition to a feel for the intensity of a crisis situation, the realistic drill gives members of the Special Emergency Response Team practice in negotiating and tactical skills needed at such times.

The Sheriff’s Office is conducting these exercises at various schools around the parish to help the officers who might be called to a real-life crisis be familiar with as many of the campuses as possible.

There have already been seven school-shooting incidents in the United States thus far in 2008, including the Feb. 8 event in Baton Rouge where a young woman shot two female students and then herself at Louisiana Technical College.

Other shootings occurred at a high school in Charlotte N.C. (Jan. 16), a high school in Memphis (Feb, 4), near an elementary school in Portsmouth, Ohio (Feb. 7), another high school in Memphis (Feb. 11), between junior high students in Oxnard, Calif. (Feb. 12), and at Northern Illinois University (Feb. 14).