Active Shooter Drill

ZANESVILLE, Ohio – A state mandated Active Shooter training exercise that included multiple state and local agencies and organizations was held Monday morning at the Zanesville High School. The exercise arranges a procedure for school officials and first responders to communicate, arrive and respond to the scenario at hand.

Zanesville Police Department Interim Chief Scott Comstock took a moment to explain how the operation would be carried out in a real life scenario.

“Today’s events kicked off with a school resource officer actually being in the school as they would be on a normal day-to-day operation. He activated the emergency MARCS notification, which would broadcast out to everyone in the area. Based on that activation we notified that it was a simulated drill and agencies were already staged in the area and responded accordingly,” Comstock said.

The Muskingum Valley Health Clinic provided employees along with some of the school faculty to role play teachers and students during the scenario so that no students were used. Comstock mentioned that Zanesville High School has been used for Active shooter training in the past but this was the first state mandated active shooter training to fulfill state requirements.

“Law Enforcement has learned a lot since 1999 with Columbine,” Comstock said. “Our response has been changed based on those events and most recently in Texas, there’s been a lot of criticism of how that was handled. Events like today help us understand where there’s flaws, where we need to work on things. Just in this morning’s events, a lot of things went smoothly but we’ve also had some stumbling blocks, things that we’re going to learn from.”

Comstock expressed gratitude to all of the agencies that participated in the exercise and noted that in a real life situation that level of cooperation between all of the organizations involved would be vital.