'Lock-down' or 'secure': What do officials mean by those terms?

When authorities respond to emergency situations involving schools, they use specific language. But what are they trying to say?

According to Elizabeth Popowich, a spokeswoman for the Regina Police Service, school authorities and police work together on emergency plans and use some key terms to talk about levels of security involving schools.

"Each school, as part of the School Emergency Preparedness Plan, has a pre-planned process for securing the safety of all staff, students and visitors within the school or designated parts of the school in response to an emergency situation," Popowich noted.

Here is the terminology commonly used:

• Lockdown: A situation where it is believed a threat is currently inside the building and/or on school property and/or the threat is attempting to gain access, and/or someone actively alarming or injuring another person and/or anyone armed with a weapon. All school occupants are secured in designated locked areas and regular school activities are stopped when the school is in "lockdown" mode.
• Secure the Building: Asituation where it is believed a threat is currently outside the building resulting in the decision to secure the school whereby all outside doors will be locked to secure the building. Each exterior door is to be monitored by designated school staff until Secure the Building mode has been lifted. Entry and exit of the building will be at the front doors only and are to be monitored by police and school administration. Regular interior school activities continue in a controlled manner.

Popowich noted that a lockdown is indicative of a more serious threat.

She added that decisions about the type of security to follow are made by school authorities who look to police for information "giving as realistic an assessment as possible of any potential threat."

"We have great communication and we work very closely with them, but they decide," Popowich said.

Terry Lazarou, spokesman for the Regina public school system, said the security protocols are common for all school divisions in the city and all officials are using the same terminology.

"In previous years people may have said, 'We're locking all the doors,'" Lazarou explained. "Now it's a unified term that means secure the building ... perhaps a more militaristic way of saying would be to secure the perimeter."

Lazarou also pointed out that a lockdown of a school includes locking all classrooms and ensuring everyone inside the building is "in a secure and safe place away from windows, away from doors and such".

Lazarou added that the first priority of school officials is the safety of students and efforts to communicate what is going on in a school may sometimes lag behind security actions.