A video regarding what to do in the event of an active shooter entering campus was played during fourth period Thursday, March 1.

The Oak Park High School administration decided to review standard gun violence response tactics with students, partly in response to the Parkland shooting.

“One of the things that we did after [the] Parkland [shooting] was review our armed intruder or active shooter protocols and procedure,” Principal Kevin Buchanan said.  “The main protocol and procedure that we went over was ‘Run, Hide and Fight.’”

The administration held trainings for staff and students in order to better educate the OPHS community on how to respond to gun violence.

“We shared a video with our teachers and conducted a training with our staff and our campus supervisors,” Buchanan said. “We then reviewed all those procedures with our entire student body and I sent emails home to the parents letting them know that that’s what we’re going to be doing.”

According to Buchanan, it was important to ensure that all students were receiving the necessary information regarding how to handle an active shooter situation to be prepared in the event that one occurs.

“The video was shown to the students so that every single student in the school and every single teacher was receiving the same information,” Buchanan said. “Other schools have done it differently. They let the teachers hold discussions and things like that. I wanted to make sure [everyone got the same information] because we didn’t just do the video we also did the discussion guide.”

The discussion guide helped teachers focus on school safety and avoid political discussion. It also helped to ensure that the discussion after the video was the same for all students. The guide was sent to parents for review.

“I thought it was really important that we narrowed the topic to specific policies and procedures and protocols regarding gun violence and made sure everybody had the same information,” Buchanan said. “Then, giving the teachers the discussion guide can confine the discussion to specific actions that we would do if it happened to us and not get into the national political debate about gun control. That’s not what we wanted.”

According to freshman Prerana Rao, OPHS is doing what it can to ensure the safety of the student body.

“It is ironic how was school is considered the safest place you could be, but are often the victims of such violent crimes. I am grateful that the school is doing so much to make us feel safe [and] teaching us what to do in these situations,” Rao said. “The video we watched was incredibly helpful, but there is still a part of me that is afraid. This is because these types of situations are so unpredictable, that once a student gets their hands on a gun there’s really not much we can do.”

Students understand that it is important to discuss and prepare for these situations but some feel frustrated about the politics.

“I understand why we need to watch videos and discuss how we should act in the situations, but it feels kind of ridiculous that we need to think and talk this much about things like bulletproof windows and escape routes when these problems could be prevented with better gun control from the government,” Arulmani said.

Additionally, students felt that political discussion took away from the overall message.

“I thought that the video and discussion were very informative, and it really helped me to understand what to do in this situation,” sophomore Blake Hanlon said. “The discussion was helpful, but there was a lot of talk about the political sides of things, when really, we should have only discussed safety procedures.”

According to Buchanan, while there are many precautions the district is taking to make students safe, a school shooting is an incredibly rare event.

“It’s important to remember that it’s an extremely unlikely event, although when it happens it’s extremely dramatic,” Buchanan said.