Students Assist in SWAT Exercise

Travis Ranch Middle School students were evacuated from their classrooms Wednesday morning by a team of SWAT officers helping to stage an emergency drill.

Police set up the scenario of a disturbance--possibly involving a gun--at a house across the street from the campus. About nine SWAT officers helped to evacuate students from the nine classrooms at the front of the school. Teachers helped clear their classrooms to the rear of the campus, said Sgt. Robert Bugbee of the Brea Police Department, which serves Yorba Linda.

It took 19 minutes for all the school’s 1,840 students to be moved to safety, Bugbee said.

Travis Ranch Principal Bill Cline said the exercise was part of the school’s safety drills, which include the standard fire or earthquake evacuations. The SWAT exercise, Klein said, is just a part of making students familiar with safety procedures so that if an emergency actually did occur they would know what to do and be calmer as a result.

“It’s our chance to take a look at how we did things and improve on it,” he said. “It’s better to work out the kinks now instead of later.”

Klein said the school conducts safety drills once or twice a month. He added that the school has included potential incidents of violence in its drills for years--even before the 1999 attack at Colorado’s Columbine High School, where 15 people died, including the two gunmen who were seniors at the school.