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BELFRY, Ky. — Kentucky State Police Post 9 hosted a Safe School Program training course Tuesday for all Belfry Area Schools.

This is the first time the Belfry area has participated in this type of training. After Tuesday, all schools in Pike County will have completed the training.

“The importance of it, I think, goes along with what we have to deal with in society right now,” said Sgt. Jason Joseph with Kentucky State Police. “It’s seems like maybe every 60 to 90 days we have some sort of active shooter situation. A lot of the time it is in schools. Just last year, the FBI documented 50 of them just in one year.”

The first day of school in Pike County has been set for next Tuesday, August 14th. Faculty and staff are hoping an active shooter scenario never happens, but are glad to be prepared.

“We wanted to have a proactive stance on it,” added Belfry High School Assistant Principal Matt Varney. “We don’t want to wait until something happens. We want to go ahead and get things in place … procedures, policies, rules that we want to go by to prevent something like this from happening.”

The training is an all-day event. All teachers, faculty and staff were welcome to engage in the course. 

“We have a power point and then also a scenario-based training that gives the teachers three options to handle a situation,” said Sgt. Joseph. “We also stress that the training that they’ve had up until this point or whatever school policies they have in place, that will take priority over anything.”

Kentucky State Police troopers are hoping to get every school in the Post 9 area trained in the Safe School Program course.