Active Aggressor Toolkit to Help Institutes of Higher Education

COLUMBUS, OH – The Ohio Emergency Management Agency has released its third in a series of toolkits to help organizations host a complete tabletop exercise. The Higher Education Active Aggressor Tabletop Exercise Toolkit provides all of the information and materials needed to easily plan and host an exercise. The toolkit incorporates feedback received from higher education facilities where the exercise scenario was tested.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, between 2000 and 2017, there have been 250 active shooter incidents in the United States. The shooting incident at Virginia Tech ranks third in terms of the number of casualties.

The objective of this Higher Education Active Aggressor Toolkit is to better prepare school staff, first responders and partners to plan for and respond to an active shooter event.

The higher education exercise covers three main objectives throughout three modules:

1. On-Scene Command and Coordination – Demonstrates leadership’s ability to identify the roles for on-scene command and coordination within a unified command structure.
2. Interoperable Communication – Demonstrates both the responders and the Institution of Higher Education’s (IHE) ability to implement interoperable communications and accurate notifications amongst agencies, both during and after an event.
3. Recovery Operations – Demonstrates the IHE’s ability to organize and coordinate recovery operations in order to resume normal business activities following an active aggressor incident, per school policy.

Ohio EMA’s two previous toolkits Mall Active Shooter and Business Continuity: Disaster in the Workplace, have been downloaded more than 450 times in 41 states and eight countries.

All three toolkits are available on the Ohio EMA website: https://ema.ohio.gov/Exercise_TableTop_Toolkit.aspx

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