Casey Kelly

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. Shots are fired in your child’s school. A shooter is on the loose.

Police are on the way. But in the meantime, your child’s life is in the hands of school officials.

In the past, teachers and students have been taught to lock down or shelter-in-place during an active shooter event. But that’s changing nationwide, including Juneau, where teachers, students and public officials are learning a new tactic for dealing with such emergencies.

The new strategy is called ALICE That’s short for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate.

Tom Mattice is emergency programs manager for the City and Borough of Juneau. He says ALICE is not a sequential checklist of things to do in the event of an active threat. Instead, he says, it gives people options.

“If I heard gunshots at the other end of the building and I knew there was a safe way to evacuate, it would be the first thing I did,” Mattice says. “If I don’t know where the threat’s coming from, I may need to lockdown for a second.”

Mattice says the “Alert” aspect of ALICE is easy: Once you can safely call the police, do so.

“Inform” teaches people to gather information about the threat.

“Counter” may sound like a suggestion to directly engage, but he says that’s only if there’s no other choice. Mattice says it actually takes advantage of the brain’s natural fight or flight instincts.

“We tell people to lock the door and get on the floor in the corner and sit and wait, and that’s not a natural instinct,” he says. “Not only that, when the intruder comes into the room, we make easy targets of ourselves.”

Dozens of YouTube videos from the for-profit ALICE Training Institute show how to counter an active shooter, including throwing things. For students and teachers in classrooms that could mean books, staplers, scissors, anything that’s not nailed down.

Another method is called swarming, where several people rush toward and try to disarm a shooter.

Blain Hatch is a school resource officer and a 22-year veteran of the Juneau Police Department. He says the lockdown response to an active threat came from the jail system.

“Which made sense. You have a problem, you lock down, isolate your threat, deal with it and move on,” Hatch says. “So, in the ‘70s, the L.A. school district took that philosophy, because they had a lot of gang problems. But it was outside, there were shootings, there were fights. Well unfortunately, in our society in the last 25-ish years, that violence has now moved into large areas—churches, malls, schools.”

JPD hosted a statewide ALICE training for school officials and first responders in December. Recently, the department held its first drill with local students and teachers at Floyd Dryden Middle School. This week, more than 50 people attended a free public training.

Hatch says the concept works well in any large setting.

“We stress, we’re not training people to be ninjas. We’re not telling you to get involved,” he says. “But if you have somebody come into a room, why would you cower down and be a victim? Try and remove yourself from the room.”

Last May, Hatch was the first officer on scene at Thunder Mountain High School after reports of a gun on campus. After determining the firearm was no longer inside the building, Hatch and the school’s principal made the decision to put classrooms in lockdown. In that situation, he says, it was the appropriate response.

“But the teachers, man, they were barricading, they were getting stuff ready in case the person came in (or) there was another threat,” says Hatch. “But yeah, that was why, because the information all dictated that the threat was outside of the school.”

Some critics of ALICE training programs have argued there’s no hard evidence that it prevents people from dying in mass shootings or other emergencies. There’s also concern about whether younger students or students with developmental disabilities can fully grasp the concepts.

But the city and Juneau School District have adopted and begun to implement the strategy.

Juneau Douglas High School teacher Sara Hannan is a member of the Juneau Education Association executive committee. She says the teachers’ union does not have a position on ALICE, but as with all district policies JEA will push for adequate training.

Hannan says she personally doesn’t have a problem with it.

“I have always been out of compliance with what our training was, and I usually told my administration that I did not intend to sit quietly if we have an emergency going on, that I would self-evacuate,” Hannan says. “And I always, you know, I kind of jokingly say to the students, but then show them, there in the corner of the room I have one of those fire escape ladders, and that we would evacuate.”

Hatch and Mattice say they hope schools will hold regular ALICE practice drills. They say fire drills essentially ended deaths from school fires, and maybe the same thing can happen with school shootings.

*Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said the “C” in ALICE stands for “combat.” It actually stands for “counter.”

Sealaska has taken possession of 70,000 acres that used to be part of the Tongass National Forest.

With photographers snapping pictures, and a roomful of corporate and federal officials looking on, Sealaska President and CEO Anthony Mallott and Bud Cribley from the Bureau of Land Management signed papers transferring title to the Tongass timber lands to the corporation at a ceremony Friday at corporation headquarters in Juneau.

Late last year, Congress passed legislation allowing Sealaska to complete its land entitlement under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. That ended a decade-plus effort by Sealaska to choose parcels outside the original Native land claims boundaries established by ANCSA.

But Mallott says the process began long before Sealaska’s lands bill was introduced.

“You can take this all the way back to the Tlingit and Haida and Tsimshian leaders who started the (Alaska Native Brotherhood) in the early 1900s,” he says. “You can go to the ‘60s and ‘70s when the original leaders that led ANCSA were being pushed by their communities, by their tribal members for a land settlement.”

Cribley, BLM’s Alaska Director, says it’s historic anytime a regional Native corporation can complete its land entitlement.

“This is very important,” Cribley says. “It’s not only important for the Bureau of Land Management as far as being able to move forward with our obligations under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act… But it’s just important from a historic standpoint of the significance of that act, and what it is doing for Sealaska and giving certainty for their future.”

Sealaska came close to shutting down timber operations in recent years, as the corporation logged most of its previously conveyed land. The transfer gives Sealaska access to new timber stands and other economic development sites. Company officials have said they may start logging the first of those new parcels this year.

But Sealaska board chair Joe Nelson says the corporation wants to treat the land with respect.

“The land is embedded in who we are,” Nelson said. “And you go to any indigenous people around the world, that makes us unique in the world, our connection to the land.”

Still, the land transfer remains controversial. It’s been opposed by environmentalists, hunting and fishing groups, as well as some communities near Sealaska’s new lands.

During the ceremony, former board chairman Albert Kookesh echoed Nelson’s comments about the importance of the land to Native people. Kookesh told the story of a man from his home village of Angoon, who used an ancient fish weir as proof that Native people will be good stewards of the land.

“If we can take care of that land for 10,000 years and have that fish stream still produce, the deer still be around, the trees still be there, then you have to give us credit for that land that we own, that we’re going to be taking care of it. That we’re going to sustain it. And it’s going to be there for another 10,000 years,” Kookesh said.

The Bureau of Land Management plans to prioritize which of Sealaska’s new parcels get surveyed and patented first to allow the company access to more valuable land sooner than later. It could take about five years to survey and patent all the tracts and another three years to complete the paperwork. But Friday’s signing ceremony officially transferred title to the land.

The legislation finalizing the corporation’s land entitlement also allows Sealaska to select up to 76 cemetery and historic sites in the Tongass, totaling no more than 490 acres. No word on when that process will be complete.

A Juneau-born, Hoonah-raised enlisted officer in the U.S. Navy has been named one of four Sailors of the Year by the commander of Submarine Force Atlantic.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Kolbjorn Skaflestad was honored as 2014 Junior Shore Sailor of the Year at a ceremony held at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia on Thursday.

Skaflestad is a sonar technician at the Naval Submarine Support Facility in New London, CT, according to a release from Submarine Force Atlantic Public Affairs.

He graduated from Hoonah School and joined the Navy in 2008.

Juneau Police say a 73-year-old man was struck by a vehicle while trying to cross Egan Drive near Gold Creek during rush hour Tuesday afternoon.

Police in a release say the man was not crossing at a crosswalk and misjudged an opening in traffic when he was hit by a vehicle driven by a 59-year-old man. The accident happened at about 4:30 p.m.

Neither man was identified, and no citations were issued. Police say the driver tried to avoid the collision.

The pedestrian was taken to Bartlett Regional Hospital for evaluation of injuries.

City officials are warning of a scam targeting Juneau water and wastewater utility customers.

According to a release, at least six residents have received calls saying their water and sewer service will be turned off unless they pay $400 via credit card. The caller has a 907 area code and claims to be from the city’s utility department.

The city always sends written notices to utility customers, and never demands payment over the phone. The city also uses an accredited third party credit card company, and does not have the ability to process credit card payments directly.

The Juneau Police Department is aware of the scam, and warns residents not to fall victim to it.

The burned out Gastineau Apartments in Juneau need to be completely demolished or gutted. That’s what the Alaska Housing Finance Corp. told city officials this week, after AHFC hired an architect to look at the building with an eye toward redevelopment.

The Juneau Assembly had hoped to seize the Gastineau Apartments by eminent domain, and have Alaska Housing finance a project by a private developer to rehab the property and turn it into affordable housing.

Mark Romick with AHFC says the state-owned corporation is not likely to get involved, after the architect’s report indicated the building is not worth saving.

“From the perspective of Alaska Housing — which you know is a governmental organization that has to comply with rules for redevelopment or development of property that the private sector doesn’t have to — it wasn’t something that we could undertake without a substantial contribution of equity from someplace,” Romick said.

He said the estimated cost to demolish the Gastineau Apartments ranges from $900,000 to gut it — leaving just the exterior concrete walls in place — to more than $1.2 million to completely raze the structure. And he says those are conservative estimates.

“Whenever you get involved in rehab or demolition like that, you don’t really know what you know until you get into it,” Romick said.

AHFC can finance some mixed-use development that includes commercial space, but Romick says it’s likely not enough for a developer to recoup the cost of demolishing the Gastineau building. He says a private developer might have more luck with something like condos or commercial office space.

“We did not look at a 100 percent commercial property, because that’s not something we normally do,” he says.

So where does that leave the Assembly?

City Attorney Amy Mead this week presented three options for moving forward. Under the first two the city would still seize the property by eminent domain, then either pay to have the building demolished itself or work with a private partner to do so. The third option would be to take legal action against the Gastineau Apartments’ owners to force them to demolish it.

“The fastest way would be for us to acquire the property and demolish the property and then be able to provide a developer with a flat lot to develop,” Mead said.

Under any of those scenarios, she said the city would be unlikely to recover all of the money it spends acquiring and demolishing the building.

The Gastineau Apartments are owned by James Barrett and his mother. They’ve been slow to act on the city’s requests to clean up the building, which was destroyed by fire in late 2012. Mead says they’re also insisting that the property is worth at least $1 million more than its assessed value.

Assembly members’ reaction to the news that the building would need to be demolished ranged from the exasperated to the stunned.

Assemblyman Loren Jones said he favors the city moving forward with the eminent domain process, so the building can be torn down as soon as possible.

“We’ve had two different engineer reports, now we have an architect’s report. Each one seems to get a little worse,” Jones said. “I don’t see anyone else on the horizon in this town that’s going to do it besides us.”

But Assemblyman Jesse Kiehl urged more caution, since eminent domain requires the city to explain for what public purpose the property would be seized.

“If suddenly we have instead of a building that can be rehabbed, we have a building that must be demolished, I don’t know that this Assembly is prepared to declare which of several potential public purposes we would use it,” Kiehl said.

The Assembly asked the attorney to come back with more information at a future meeting. Members said they’d also be interested in hearing from Alaska Housing directly.

Romick with AHFC says the architect’s report from Juneau-based Jensen Yorba Lott is being finalized. Once it is, he says it will be released publicly. He estimated that would happen in a few weeks.