Sheriff’s Office, others practice crisis situation at school

SCOTT TRUXELL/independent editor

The call came in at 9 a.m. Saturday – an active shooter was inside Lincolnview Jr. High/High School and shots had been fired within the building, which prompted a rapid and large scale response from local law enforcement officers and other emergency personnel.

Thankfully, it was just a drill – a training exercise organized by the Van Wert County Sheriff’s Office. For the next three hours, emergency responders worked to hone their skills in the simulated crisis situation.

“The purpose of the exercise is to allow all of the agencies that are operating within our county the opportunity to come together and work through an active shooter/active threat situation within a school setting,” Van Wert County Sheriff Tom Riggenbach said.

The training excerise is done once a year each summer and is usually rotated between the county schools. However, this year’s drill was moved from Crestview Local Schools to Lincolnview due to Crestview’s ongoing renovation project. 

“It allows everybody to spend some time performing the different tasks within the schools, because they’re all different,” Riggenbach explained. “How do we get to the school…how do we get into the school..how do we respond based on the stimulus that is part of the drill? It’s very important for us to work on this and being able to have this drill every year is vital to put the different things we’re working on throughout the year to a test.”

“We’re always looking for ways to get better in our response,” he added.

He also noted it’s not the same scenario every year.

“We change things up each year based on what we are seeing from the year past as well as emerging trends or best practices,” Riggenbach stated. “We’re incredibly thankful to all the school systems for giving us access each year so that we can work together on this.”

In this particular scenario, early information was limited – the call from dispatch went out as a male had gone in the school through the main entrance and was firing shots.

“That was all the information that was able to be provided and so that’s what we responded to,” Riggenbach explained. “The response varies by individual law enforcement officers based on the location of where they’re coming from, if any new information comes in – that drives our response.”

Along with the Van Wert County Sheriff’s Office, the drill prompted a response from the Van Wert Police Department, the Van Wert Post of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, multiple officers from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the Van Wert Fire Department, Middle Point Fire Department and members of Van Wert County CERT.

In addition to the “all hands on deck” approach, “actors” were inside the building, with those actors being school personnel and others.

“Lincolnview worked to get a number of ‘actors’ for us,” Riggenbach said. “We don’t share that in our briefing because we need people to be responding with limited information because that’s really possible how it’s going to be in the initial stages, until more information can be obtained as our training event unfolds. We try to make as similar to a live event as we possibly can.”

“It’s important for the community to know that we’re doing everything we can to be as prepared as possible in the event something like this happens in Van Wert County,” he added.

The drill also included all road entrances to the school being blocked off to traffic and drones buzzing overhead to help gather as much information as possible. As the drill progressed, scanner traffic crackled with reports of “mass injuries” and medical transports.

If you’re wondering – after the exercise, Riggenbach was asked about the outcome. Was the shooter taken into custody or was he otherwise neutralized? His answer: the simulated shooter took his own life when law enforcement entered the building – a very real scenario.

After the training exercise, a debriefing session was held to analyze and review the results.