Emery High drama department and the Emery County Sheriff’s Office emergency team responded to Emery High for a mock drill. Each spring before school lets out for the summer the two team up for training. The training is important for the responders to learn the layout of the school in the event of an emergency. Neal Peacock is the drama teacher at Emery High and the students are glad to help out as they play the parts of injured students and the role of the criminals in the event.
Peacock said, “This is an eye opening experience for the kids to see how good our SWAT teams are in the county. It amazes the kids how good these officers are at their job. It is a fun challenge to stump the officers and they look forward to it. For the training this day there were three different locations where the students played the role of injured students. The officers went through the different scenarios. New this year was an incident with a school bus where the criminals held hostages on the school bus. The officers rushed the bus and climbed on board where they disarmed the criminal.
The local EMTs also were on hand to take care of the drama students with mock injuries.
Sheriff Greg Funk said “The Utah Highway Patrol and other agencies joined in this scenario. We had about 20 officers on three different entry teams. This kind of training is more realistic and with the kids in make-up and costume it makes it so real. In a small community like this chances are we know some of these kids. In a real situation we would have to bypass injured people and if you know them, it makes it a tough situation. It adds a whole new aspect to the training. This is a fantastic scenario. I can’t think of anything better. The UHP officers said they would like to implement this type of training at the state level. Getting into the schools and learning the layout of the schools is important so the officers can learn the buildings and become familiar with them. That school bus scenario was a new situation for our officers and a real learning experience. We’ve discussed ways to handle that better. We hope that any mistakes we make will all be in training situations. If we ever have a real life situation, we hope we can handle it as we have trained. When you are dealing with human life we hope we can act in a quick and professional manner.”
Emergency team trains with Emery High drama students
"Jaden Gordon and fellow drama student follow instructs by the deputies to sit on the curb."