About 100 administrators, counselors and other leaders from the Mobile County Public School System gathered at Murphy High School recently to complete ALICE training, a nationally recognized program designed to prepare school staff for active-shooter and violent-intruder situations.
ALICE, which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate, moves beyond the traditional lockdown-only approach that many schools have relied on for decades. Instead of instructing students and staff to simply shelter in place and wait, the program teaches a range of options that can be adapted to the specific circumstances of an emergency, giving people inside a building more ways to protect themselves if a threat gets close.
The training combined online assessments, video presentations and hands-on demonstrations, walking participants through what each step of the ALICE framework looks like in practice. Alerting others quickly, locking down a room effectively, sharing real-time information, countering a threat as a last resort, and evacuating safely when possible are all treated as tools that can be used in whatever order or combination best fits a given situation.
District leaders who took part in the session are expected to carry the training back to their individual schools, where it will eventually be passed down to teachers and students through age-appropriate drills and instruction. That cascading approach is central to how ALICE is meant to work: rather than a single districtwide briefing, the goal is for every campus to have staff members who deeply understand the protocol and can teach it to others.
“School should be a safe haven, a place to learn, but we realize in society there are a lot of people that don’t make the best choices. So we need to be cognizant and mindful of all the cues and the signs and things we can do to make sure our students are safe,” said Apryle Williams, a guidance counselor at Scarborough Middle School who attended the training.
School safety has remained a top priority for administrators and parents across Mobile County in recent years, as districts nationwide have worked to update emergency plans in response to violent incidents at schools elsewhere in the country. Programs like ALICE, which was developed in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shooting and has since been adopted by thousands of school districts and other organizations across the country, are part of a broader shift toward giving occupants more agency during an emergency rather than relying on a single, rigid response.
Murphy High School served as the training site for this session, drawing leaders from schools throughout the Mobile County Public School System. District officials have not announced a timeline for when the training will be extended to additional staff and students, though the program’s design anticipates that trained leaders will begin incorporating its principles into their own campuses’ safety planning in the coming months.