Fort Bragg Schools Hold Security Drills Beginning This Week

Fort Bragg schools are serious about safety for their 11 installation schools. Between Fort Bragg and Linden Oaks, the Department of Defense schools serve military families with children in kindergarten through eighth grade. Beginning Monday, the schools will enforce lock-down drills.

The drills were planned before the school shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., said Ben Abel, a Fort Bragg spokesman in Sunday's Fayetteville Observer report.

The exercises are comparable to fire drills or bomb threats and are taking place at schools on military bases around the world, said Elaine Kanellis, a spokeswoman for the Defense Department Education Activity in Arlington, Va.

Over the past year the schools have enacted fire, hurricane and tornado drills and now their plans will include bomb threats or strangers in a school brandishing firearms.

"The incidence of this statistically - a shooting occurring in a school, with all the number of schools we've got in the United States - is minimal, but we need to be prepared," Mike Thornburg, the education operations chief, told the school board in a Jan. 3 meeting discussing safety measures.