Active shooter drill held at Montgomery Catholic School

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WAKA) – The Montgomery City/County Emergency Management Agency has held an active shooter drill at Montgomery Catholic School.

Today, the entire community of first responders, including emergency services, hospitals, law enforcement agencies and 911 came together for this training exercise which took eight months to plan.  It’s the first time all of these agencies have gotten together to work on a school shooter drill in Montgomery.

Montgomery Catholic School’s entire faculty and staff were on campus to participate.

“We do exercises similar to this once a month at Montgomery Catholic,” School President Justin Castanza told Action 8 News. “This will be the first time that we’ve done a live exercise. It’s the first time we brought in the law enforcement agencies, the first responders, and so today, it’s very real very quickly.”

“Montgomery Catholic reached out and wanted to have an active shooter preparedness exercise to make sure they are prepared in the worst-case scenario, so the last 6, 7, 8 months we’ve been able to pull all of these people together, pull a plan together, and today is going to be the day we execute and see what we can learn from it,” Montgomery City/County EMA Director Wade Lyles said.

Castanza says today’s exercise wasn’t about finding the holes in the system, pointing fingers at what they did wrong, but it was about giving their teachers, faculty and the school community resources to be able to respond in the best way possible if the worst were to come true.