It’s one thing for kids to play in the driveway on a nice day.

It’s another thing for them to play ALICE drill in the driveway and hide out in the garage or behind the bushes.

The ALICE program was created by Greg Crane, a police officer in Dallas, Texas. His wife, Lisa, was an elementary school teacher. After the Columbine shooting, Greg asked Lisa what the school’s plan was if something similar to Columbine ever happened at their school. After learning that their plan included making themselves what Crane believed to be easy targets by simply sitting in a dark corner, he and another fellow officer went to work and devised what we call ALICE– alert, lockdown, inform, counter, and evacuate. 

In light of recent shootings at Umpqua Community College, Northern Arizona University, Southern Texas University, Tennessee State University and Winston-Salem University of North Carolina, along with with recent stabbing at University of California at Merced, the entire nation has come abuzz with two main ideas: gun laws and mental health care.

While gun laws and mental health care should be priorities, another idea should also be plaguing the minds of our nation: how these all too common occurrences are handled.

NHS has stepped up and given its students ALICE as a more effective way to combat anyone who poses a threat to their safety. Its students have been looking for something more similar to this for years now, and yet they don’t heed the rules. It’s common to hear whispering while in lockdown mode. It’s common to hear snickering while in the middle of an ALICE drill. If practice carries over into performance, are you going to be the one who gives us away to the shooter?

Two officers devoted their time to make ALICE a nationally recognized program for all schools across the country. They studied past shooters’ motives, plans of action and potential ways to fight back or outsmart them. They went back and forth with teachers, administrators and other police officers to determine the best way to prepare for the worst. Yet we still have parents and children alike mocking the protocol. This is the best we have. Do you have another alternative?

The Mill Stream believes that the students of NHS should stop thinking that we are immune to school violence and treat ALICE drills more seriously than we currently do. Some argue that “Oh, ALICE isn’t the perfect answer to fighting back against intruders with a gun,” but, reflecting on that idea, will there ever be a perfect, one hundred percent correct answer to deflecting extreme violence?

The answer: probably not. ALICE is not perfect. Sitting in a dark corner is even farther from perfect. There is no sure-fire method to stop school wide atrocities as horrendous as school shootings. People don’t possess that kind of influential power over others that would stop all the gut wrenching crime that affects an entire community. What we do have, though, is the ability to use ALICE to our advantage and execute it to our very best.

Or, we could continue to whisper. We could continue to laugh.

We could continue to let kids make a game of ALICE in the driveway.