Harlingen CISD hosts emergency management training

HARLINGEN, Texas (ValleyCentral) — There is just a little less than a month until students at Harlingen CISD go back to the classroom. As part of preparing for the new school year, the district conducted, for the first time ever, a multi-agency drill to respond to a mass casualty event.

“This has been in the works for several months," Danny Castillo, Harlingen CISD Director of Emergency Management. "It has involved a number of municipal, county, state, and federal agencies that truly replicate and emulate in the event of a mass incident.”

Hundreds of officers from multiple agencies are responding to a simulated active shooter situation on a campus.

Officers were tasked with finding and eliminating the threat without any prior information.

The drill also includes actors playing injured victims and simulated EMS responses.

According to Education Week’s school shooting tracker. There have been 20 school shootings in 2024, with 34 people either killed or injured.

Castillo says the main goal of this kind of training is to test how well different law enforcement agencies, EMS, the fire department, and the Houston CISD guardians can communicate with each other.

“This district has armed guardians that we use here in the number of out campuses and more importantly how does the other response support agencies fold into the resources that are at any given time present on the campus," Castillo said.

This massive operation took the team work of several agencies including Harlingen PD the Cameron County Sheriff’s Office and Texas DPS, those are just to name a few.

Sgt. Larry Moore with the Harlingen Police Department said it is important to train for these kinds of situations.

“We have had incidents in the past nothing in the magnitude, but we’ve noticed with smaller incidents we have had officers from Brownsville to McAllen even respond. The problem was when they respond we were not sure if they knew their objectives they were just showing up with no direction," Moore said. "This helps us get the direction on where you go and what are you going to do.”

While the Harlingen Police Department has an ongoing relationship with the school district, which includes stationing at least one officer at each campus, the biggest benefit of working together is being able to review how they responded to this drill.

“Obviously there is no perfect scenario here there’s a debrief that we are going to have after the exercise where we are all going to come together to go over what went right and what went wrong," said Juan Rodriguez, Harlingen CISD Public Relations Coordinator. "But what is something we can work on collectively.”

But as the school year prepares to start, parents will have concerns about school safety and the only way to ensure that is to always be prepared for the unthinkable.

“What parents needs to understand that we here at the district as well as every other school district in our state take safety very much as a highest priority we understand for students to learn they have to feel safe,” Castillo said.

Harlingen CISD says it plans to do more multi agency drills in the future.