A Black Curtain Is Not Enough
Active Assailant Training for Christian Schools. Why, what, who, when, and what it costs, in one guide. Free.
Most likely, your accreditor already told you to train your people. Most schools answered it with a drill. Curtain down, lights off, sit in a corner nobody has ever checked against the line of fire, be quiet. That is a death sentence the moment an attacker breaks the glass or puts a round in the door jamb. I would not trust my kids' lives to a piece of black cloth, and neither should you.
Get the guide.
Enter your name and email and it is yours. No cost, no call required.
What is inside
- WHY do the training at all, starting with your own classroom door and what the standard advice gets wrong.
- WHAT good training looks like, so nobody dreads it again. A straight comparison of the volunteer, the local police, the free federal video, and the national brands, and what you get when I am the one teaching.
- WHO needs it, and why the answer is not the security team only.
- WHEN to do it, so it fits the calendar you actually have.
- WHAT IT COSTS. Real numbers. Nobody in this industry wants to write that section. I did.
Grounded in Scripture, because the course is. Every claim sourced, with the sources listed at the end so you can check me. Thirty-one pages.
Read the first pages
Most likely, your accreditor already told you to train your people. ACCS and ACSI, two of the most recognized Christian school organizations, both ask for a plan supported by training, which is more than the law asks of a Christian school almost anywhere in the country. Most schools answered it with a drill. Curtain down, lights off, sit in a corner nobody has ever checked against the line of fire, be quiet. That is a death sentence the moment an attacker breaks the glass or puts a round in the door jamb. I would not trust my kids' lives to a piece of black cloth, and neither should you.
I have sat across from a lot of heads of school who fully intend to do this. They are not careless people. They love the children in their building and they lose sleep over exactly what you would expect.
One of them, a good administrator who had clearly thought about it, defended the black curtains to me with a fact. No attacker has ever broken through a locked classroom door. Half of that is true. No attacker in a school has ever defeated the lock itself. But in 2005, at Red Lake, Minnesota, the attacker met a locked classroom door, shot out the glass beside it, and walked in. The lock held. The glass did not. That is the lesson, and almost everybody drew the opposite one. Instead of reinforcing the door and the glass so the next attacker cannot get in either, most of the country went with smoke and mirrors, a piece of black fabric over a pane of glass that can be broken and reached through in seconds.
He is not alone. A school resource officer in a completely different state told me nearly the same sentence and said he had it from the Secret Service. This is not one administrator's opinion. It is a way of thinking that has worked its way through official channels into buildings all over the country, and it is going to get people killed.
And that is usually where it ends. The curtain goes up, a drill goes on the calendar, the box gets checked, and the training that would have made any of it work gets bumped to next year. Then something happens somewhere, or their own building has a close call, and suddenly it is urgent, and they take whatever they can get fastest. Nobody looks at it again for three years.
It is never because they do not care. It is time, it is budget, and a shortage of options worth trusting. It is dread, theirs and their people's, because everybody has sat through this done badly and almost nobody has seen it done well. And at the bottom of all of it, they simply do not know better, because nobody has ever told them clearly what to do. Not the state, not the vendor, not the officer who meant well. This guide is my attempt to bring some clarity to that.
Start with the door
Go stand in one of your classrooms. Pick the youngest children you have.
Look at the door.
Ask five questions about that room and answer them honestly, because nobody else is going to ask you.
What is actually holding it if somebody puts a shoulder into it? In most of the buildings I walk, the answer is a lock that cost somebody about ten dollars, seated in a wood jamb.
What is beside it, or set into it? Usually a pane of glass.
What is over that glass? In most Christian schools I walk, a black pull-down shade that somebody bought because it was on a checklist. Hold that thought. The shade gets its own pages a little further on.
Now widen out from the door to the room itself.
How many ways in are there? One door to the hallway, or two doors, or a connecting door to the classroom next to it?
What glass does it have? A ground floor window to the outside. A window onto the hallway. The window in the door.
If your answers came out different from what I described, good. You are ahead of most of the schools I see, and I would rather hear that than be right. If they came out the same, that is the plan your building is running on right now.
Then go ask the teacher who works in that room what they were told to do on the worst day. I cannot tell you what they will say. I can tell you what I hear in almost every school in this country. Lock the door. Pull the shade. Get the children into the corner.
So go find the corner. The one they would move twenty children to. Stand in it and turn around slowly.
If that room has two ways in, or a ground floor window, or a window onto the hallway, there is most likely no corner in it that is out of the line of fire from all of them at once. Not one. The corner works in a room with a single door and no glass, and those rooms are not nearly as common as we would like them to be.
In most of the rooms I walk, nobody has ever stood there with that teacher and worked this out. They were handed a word, corner, and left to pick one. Most pick the one farthest from the door, which is very often the one framed perfectly by the window beside it.
That is one of the three steps taken apart in about ninety seconds, standing in your own room, for free. The other two take longer and they matter more, and I will get to both of them before this part is over.
But first, the thing standing between most schools and a trained building, because it is not doubt.
You already believe this can happen. Every leader I meet does. That is not what is standing between a school and a trained building.
What usually stands in the way is that the school already believes it has a plan. There is a lockdown policy. There is a drill on the calendar. There is a line in the board minutes. So when active assailant training comes up, it feels like a duplicate of something already owned.
It is not the same thing. Three steps handed down by people who have never stood in that room is not a plan, and not one of the three does what the teacher standing behind that door believes it does.
The rest of it is one form away.
Thirty-one pages. Every claim sourced. No cost, no call required.
Trident Shield. (423) 849-1233. Together We Save Lives.
- WHY do the training at all, starting with your own classroom door and what the standard advice gets wrong.
- WHAT good training looks like, so nobody dreads it again. A straight comparison of the volunteer, the local police, the free federal video, and the national brands, and what you get when I am the one teaching.
- WHO needs it, and why the answer is not the security team only.
- WHEN to do it, so it fits the calendar you actually have.
- WHAT IT COSTS. Real numbers. Nobody in this industry wants to write that section. I did.
Grounded in Scripture, because the course is. Every claim sourced, with the sources listed at the end so you can check me. Thirty-one pages.
Read the first pages
Most likely, your accreditor already told you to train your people. ACCS and ACSI, two of the most recognized Christian school organizations, both ask for a plan supported by training, which is more than the law asks of a Christian school almost anywhere in the country. Most schools answered it with a drill. Curtain down, lights off, sit in a corner nobody has ever checked against the line of fire, be quiet. That is a death sentence the moment an attacker breaks the glass or puts a round in the door jamb. I would not trust my kids' lives to a piece of black cloth, and neither should you.
I have sat across from a lot of heads of school who fully intend to do this. They are not careless people. They love the children in their building and they lose sleep over exactly what you would expect.
One of them, a good administrator who had clearly thought about it, defended the black curtains to me with a fact. No attacker has ever broken through a locked classroom door. Half of that is true. No attacker in a school has ever defeated the lock itself. But in 2005, at Red Lake, Minnesota, the attacker met a locked classroom door, shot out the glass beside it, and walked in. The lock held. The glass did not. That is the lesson, and almost everybody drew the opposite one. Instead of reinforcing the door and the glass so the next attacker cannot get in either, most of the country went with smoke and mirrors, a piece of black fabric over a pane of glass that can be broken and reached through in seconds.
He is not alone. A school resource officer in a completely different state told me nearly the same sentence and said he had it from the Secret Service. This is not one administrator's opinion. It is a way of thinking that has worked its way through official channels into buildings all over the country, and it is going to get people killed.
And that is usually where it ends. The curtain goes up, a drill goes on the calendar, the box gets checked, and the training that would have made any of it work gets bumped to next year. Then something happens somewhere, or their own building has a close call, and suddenly it is urgent, and they take whatever they can get fastest. Nobody looks at it again for three years.
It is never because they do not care. It is time, it is budget, and a shortage of options worth trusting. It is dread, theirs and their people's, because everybody has sat through this done badly and almost nobody has seen it done well. And at the bottom of all of it, they simply do not know better, because nobody has ever told them clearly what to do. Not the state, not the vendor, not the officer who meant well. This guide is my attempt to bring some clarity to that.
Start with the door
Go stand in one of your classrooms. Pick the youngest children you have.
Look at the door.
Ask five questions about that room and answer them honestly, because nobody else is going to ask you.
What is actually holding it if somebody puts a shoulder into it? In most of the buildings I walk, the answer is a lock that cost somebody about ten dollars, seated in a wood jamb.
What is beside it, or set into it? Usually a pane of glass.
What is over that glass? In most Christian schools I walk, a black pull-down shade that somebody bought because it was on a checklist. Hold that thought. The shade gets its own pages a little further on.
Now widen out from the door to the room itself.
How many ways in are there? One door to the hallway, or two doors, or a connecting door to the classroom next to it?
What glass does it have? A ground floor window to the outside. A window onto the hallway. The window in the door.
If your answers came out different from what I described, good. You are ahead of most of the schools I see, and I would rather hear that than be right. If they came out the same, that is the plan your building is running on right now.
Then go ask the teacher who works in that room what they were told to do on the worst day. I cannot tell you what they will say. I can tell you what I hear in almost every school in this country. Lock the door. Pull the shade. Get the children into the corner.
So go find the corner. The one they would move twenty children to. Stand in it and turn around slowly.
If that room has two ways in, or a ground floor window, or a window onto the hallway, there is most likely no corner in it that is out of the line of fire from all of them at once. Not one. The corner works in a room with a single door and no glass, and those rooms are not nearly as common as we would like them to be.
In most of the rooms I walk, nobody has ever stood there with that teacher and worked this out. They were handed a word, corner, and left to pick one. Most pick the one farthest from the door, which is very often the one framed perfectly by the window beside it.
That is one of the three steps taken apart in about ninety seconds, standing in your own room, for free. The other two take longer and they matter more, and I will get to both of them before this part is over.
But first, the thing standing between most schools and a trained building, because it is not doubt.
You already believe this can happen. Every leader I meet does. That is not what is standing between a school and a trained building.
What usually stands in the way is that the school already believes it has a plan. There is a lockdown policy. There is a drill on the calendar. There is a line in the board minutes. So when active assailant training comes up, it feels like a duplicate of something already owned.
It is not the same thing. Three steps handed down by people who have never stood in that room is not a plan, and not one of the three does what the teacher standing behind that door believes it does.
The rest of it is one form away.
Thirty-one pages. Every claim sourced. No cost, no call required.
Trident Shield. (423) 849-1233. Together We Save Lives.
