OAK HILL, WV (WOAY) – Students in the Aerospace Engineering CTE (Career Technical Education) program at Oak Hill High School are getting prepared in emergency response training.
For the certification they need, the seniors decided to receive training in ALERRT Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events. It’s a training program similar to the Run Hide Fight initiative.
“Well, truly it would be an important learning experience for just about anybody out there now, we just live in different times than when I grew up, and you just never know what’s going to happen out there,” says Kim Cortines, the Aerospace Engineering CTE Instructor.
The new Student Readiness Team undergoing the training is learning that they have options to avoid, deny, or defend themselves in the event of an active shooter situation.
Fayette County Sheriff Department Lt. Jess McMullen is leading the training. He says it’s a skill set students can take with them beyond high school and into the real world.
“It’s kind of a broad spectrum of the training that will take care of these kids when they’re out in the real world,” McMullen says. “When they graduate and go to college it will help them there, it will help them with their own families if they’re in the grocery store or department store or wherever they may be, it’s a training that’s designed to make you aware of your surroundings no matter where you may be.”
After receiving the ALERRT training, the eleventh and twelfth-grade students made the decision to take it even further with CPR and Stop the Bleed training.
The students say it’s an opportunity they are glad to be getting.
“It could save our lives, if not ours, then someone else’s,” says eleventh-grade student Eli Calloway.
“It could also help other people want to learn about things to do if this were to happen because it could happen anywhere at any time,” adds another eleventh-grade student, Skylar Willis.
The students completed the ALERRT training on February 8. They are getting ready to take CPR and Stop the Bleed training on Feb. 22 through Feb. 24 with the Fayette Institute of Technology’s Health and Sciences Education Program.
