GORHAM – Local police departments and about 100 area high school students will descend on the shuttered White Rock Elementary School in Gorham during February vacation to review and improve law enforcement’s tactics regarding school-shooter incidents.

About 80 officers from Windham and Gorham police departments and deputies from Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office will cycle through the training exercises during the week. Eight officers will take part in morning and afternoon sessions, which include classroom training, as well as mock drills.

To make the training more realistic, the sheriff’s office, which is hosting the event at the recently closed White Rock school, has invited high school students, as well. The 100 or so student volunteers will earn community service credits for their role with groups of 10-25 students used for each session.

Deputy Joe Schnupp, community relations officer at the sheriff’s office, will be in charge of the “actors” and said the students will play a vital role in the training.

“The kids are going to make this more realistic and more impacting on the officers because it’s really easy to have a mannequin in a seat or in the hallway, but to have actual kids that are going to provide mayhem – that’s what I’m calling it – I want them to scream, yell and be as distracting as possible to the guys that are in the training,” Schnupp said.

Students from Windham, Cheverus, Lake Region, Gorham, McAuley and Waynflete are among those volunteering. Schnupp said similar training exercises with high school students have taken place previously in Brunswick and Windham. The training is invaluable, Schnupp said.

“I’m a dad, and as a dad, I want the guys that might come to my kid’s school to be as prepared as they possibly could be for the unthinkable event that could happen,” said Schnupp, whose own kids, as well as other officers’ children, will take part in the training.

The recent shooting in Newtown, Conn., where 20 elementary students and six staff members were killed by an intruder, lends more urgency to a refresher course for the area’s first responders, said Capt. Shawn O’Leary, who’s in charge of all training for sheriff’s deputies.

“For us, Gorham and Windham, it is solely a review and update of tactics that have been in place since the Columbine shooting. And, unfortunately, when tragedy strikes, agencies will say, ‘Have we done this training in a while?’ because maybe we need to do an agency-wide training so everyone is on the same page and everyone remembers what they’re supposed to do,” O’Leary said.

Schnupp said duty pistols and other duty weapons won’t be used during the training. The officers use Airsoft guns, which are weapons that look and feel like real guns and discharge puffs of air rather than bullets.

“Prior to each session, kids will be searched, police officers will be searched so nothing is accidentally being brought into the training site,” O’Leary said. “We’ve done this training numerous times and safety is paramount for us.”

Schnupp and O’Leary have also invited administrators from area schools and are hoping the realistic school environment with kids, teachers and administrators in classrooms and hallways will add a sense of reality to the training.

“Hopefully the more people we have involved the more chaos we’ll be able to generate, which then increases the stress to the patrol deputies and officers,” O’Leary said.

Both Schnupp and O’Leary said they couldn’t go into detail regarding the upcoming simulation training, but that the police will be going through protocols that have been updated in recent years.

O’Leary said since the deadly rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, police have changed their tactics when confronting a school shooter.

“Pre-Columbine, SWAT teams would be called and they would make a very detailed and slow entry into the building and search the entire building very slowly. But what we found out through Columbine was that if you can get enough first responders inside and engage the threat immediately, then lives will be saved,” O’Leary said. “And in Newtown, they’re speculating when the shooter heard the sirens he immediately took his own life because he knew the police were arriving and they would go straight into the school.”

O’Leary said the training, which applies to other large buildings such as supermarkets and workplaces, is taught at the police academy and that the upcoming training session is a necessary refresher.

“It’s standard training at the academy, this is an update and review,” he said. “And unfortunately it was because of Newtown that we started thinking, well, we need to do another review because it’s happening more and more.”

Good practice

Windham High School Principal Chris Howell, who remembers a tense lockdown of the high school when a man was shooting randomly in a neighborhood across the street from the school about 10 years ago, said the training is useful to all involved.

“It’s to give police departments a chance to practice what it’s like to be in an environment where you have that many kids and what are some of the things you look for and how do you quickly scan that environment,” he said.

Windham Police Chief Rick Lewsen said his department would benefit from the extra training.

“It’s very valuable training that the sheriff’s office has offered,” he said.

In Gorham, officials welcomed the training as well, but will not be involved.

“It is not a crisis drill for school departments to be part of,” Gorham Superintendent Ted Sharp said Tuesday. “[Gorham schools] hold crisis drills with local law enforcement each year and have done so for at least five years.”

In a December letter to parents following the tragedy in Newtown, Sharp wrote that all Gorham schools have emergency plans in place. Gorham Police Chief Ronald Shepard said Tuesday that those plans have been reviewed recently.

In a response to a threat that occurred the week after the Newtown shooting, Gorham police were on heightened alert following a message posted on Facebook that a high school in York or Cumberland County would be targeted. Until the threat was determined baseless, Gorham police stepped up patrols and the number of officers on duty at the town’s five schools.

Shepard said the regional crisis training would afford his officers an opportunity to train with those from other departments and to swap ideas.

“It’s to get all the departments together so we’re on the same page,” Shepard said.

In a similar joint exercise scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 19, Shepard said Gorham Police Department officers would train with University of Southern Maine police on the Gorham campus.

Judie O’Malley, university spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the exercise would be in Bailey Hall. O’Malley said no university students would be involved in the emergency exercise that involves off-campus agencies.

Now, with the 60-year-old White Rock school, which closed in 2011, slated for demolition, the regional school crisis training could spell the final use of the building.

“I am certain whatever they learn from the experience will make all of us safer,” Gorham High School Principal Chris Record said.

While the training is mostly geared toward training the officers, students will learn something, as well, O’Leary said. The school-shooter training is an extension of nuclear-disaster drills from long ago, O’Leary said, when children would learn how react in case of a bomb blast.

“During the Cold War they used to have routine drills. Individuals would pull the alarm, crawl under desks, cover their heads in case of a nuclear bomb. So you want your kids to be prepared. We do fire drills, we do a bunch of other drills so our officers are trained. And the kids will be very well supervised, and we’ll let them know how to behave,” he said.

Reporter Robert Lowell contributed to this article.