TOPSHAM

A shot echoed through the brick hallways at Mt. Ararat High School on Tuesday.

Voices repeatedly shouted “help!”

An armed police officer moved from the school’s entrance up the stairwell, carefully through two sets of doors into a hallway.

Then a man ran down the hallway toward the officer with arms up and pointing, yelling “he went that way.”

“What does he look like?” the officer asked. Looking for a shooter in a red baseball cap, he proceeds down the hall toward a classroom. With weapon drawn and eyes peeled, the officer swept into the classroom to find an armed man pointing a gun at a hostage on the ground, but he was successful in disabling the shooter.

One by one local police officers armed with airsoft guns ran through exercises involving active shooters Tuesday at the high school. They started with entering and clearing rooms and with the help of actors — most of them students helping for the day — and practiced increasingly complicated scenarios.

Officers at all levels are participating in the regional training during school vacation week from Brunswick, Topsham, Bath, Richmond and Phippsburg police departments, the Maine Marine Service and Maine Warden Service as well as the Sagadahoc County Sheriff ’s Office.

Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry said an Edward Bryne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant helped fund part of the training. The sheriff ’s department opted to utilize the funds regionally through joint training, which has several benefits.

“First of all, if a major incident like this ever took place, we’d be relying on support from other agencies as well and mutual aid,” Merry said. “And the second thing is, we’ve got to be smart about how we spend tight budget dollars and this is a good example of how working together can also save funding; and we can share our resources, the expertise of our instructors and their skills.”

Instances of school- and work-related shootings are taken very seriously by police, Merry said, and the training is always evolving.

“We never want to see it happen but if it does happen, we’ve got to be ready to respond and respond in such a way that we’re going to minimize death and injury,” Merry said. “We’ve got to be quick and we’ve got to be efficient and we’ve got to know exactly what we’re doing.”

Often active shooter incidents will end in the shooter taking their own life, but first “they certainly want to make that statement,” the sheriff said.

“Our position is, let’s get to them before they harm others,” said Merry, “and I don’t think any community can be inoculated from such an occurrence.”

Late Monday morning, officers from law enforcement agencies responded to an incident at the Bath Waterfront Park involving a man with a handgun who fired a shot into the ground. Fortunately, the incident ended peacefully.

“That is why we’re doing this regional approach and having officers from different agencies, because you never know what day of the week it will be, what time during the day, who will be on duty and off duty,” Merry said. “We work together, train together and have to depend on each other particularly in these life or death situations.

“It’s not a matter of how or if it will happen,” he added. “It’s a matter of when.”

Cpl. Aaron Skolfield, a firearms instructor with Sagadahoc County Sheriff ’s Office, led the training Tuesday with the help of instructors from the sheriff ’s department and Brunswick Police Department. The training expands on the first regional active shooter training, which took place in June 2013 at Bowdoinham Community School.

That includes the use of new airsoft guns the sheriff ’s office purchased with the Bryne grant. The guns look, feel and function like officers’ real weapons and fire small BBs that provide a cost-effective, easy cleanup alternative to more expensive simunitions training. It allow officers to engage one another and find weak points in the training.

“We’re looking at how you react to the environment around you, whether it’s screaming students or a threat,” Skolfield said. “How are they reacting and are they doing the right thing with their training equipment, which would mimic what they would do in real life.”

Sheriff ’s Deputy Matt Sharpe is a Mt. Ararat graduate, and Tuesday morning was back in the hallways he last walked in 1986 when no one had heard of school shootings.

It’s back to the basics and you learn something new and put yourself in check through this type of training, Sharpe said. Feeling the adrenaline rush, he found he had to slow down and fight the urge to run through the scenarios. Training can’t simulate every scenario but the debriefings after allow the offices to talk about, “what if this happened?”

“All of us have major schools in our districts,” Sharpe said, “and it’s even more important for the local agencies to work together and know each other,” and not just by acquaintance, because “when you get to know people on a personal level like that, I think it makes the communication in a tense situation that much easier.”

dmoore@timesrecord.com