RAPID CITY - Debriefings that followed the April 17 lockdown of the entire Rapid City School District will lead to improvements in how crises are handled in the future, according to officials who gathered Tuesday night for a parent forum.

Although the only parents attending the forum were school officials and law enforcement officers, school administrators from Spearfish and Meade school districts came to hear more about handling emergency situations.

"We want to learn from their experience," Meade superintendent James Heinert said.

The lockdown was prompted by a false report from a student that a man carrying a gun was seen in Central High School. The incident occurred one day after the mass shootings on the Virginia Tech campus.

Assistant superintendent Harry Brenden ordered the lockdown of all 30 buildings in the Rapid City school system after an initial search of Central failed to locate a gunman. Superintendent Peter Wharton was out of town at the time of the incident.

Locking down the entire school district was the right decision, according to Rapid City Police Chief Craig Tieszen.

But calling liaison officers to assist at Central on April 17 left their schools without an officer when the district-wide lockdown was implemented, he said.

"Next time, we would probably make our liaison officers our last responders, rather than our first responders," Tieszen said.

Debriefings also revealed that there was not a specific plan in place to alert private schools to the potential danger, Tieszen said. All of the schools apparently learned of the event, but not by a specific, planned method.

Keeping parents and his schools informed about what was happening proved a challenging, according to Brenden. Brenden juggled cell phone and telephone calls to stay in contact with law enforcement officials in the command center and the district's schools.

E-mail proved the most expedient and more efficient method to stay in contact, Brenden said.

Wharton said the district's technology department is exploring the possibility of an automated calling system that would alert parents, and even childcare providers, when an emergency occurs.

Text messaging and cell-phone calls assured many parents that their children were safe, according to school board parent Doug Kinniburgh, whose twin daughters attend Dakota Middle School.

Kyleen Kinniburgh, 13, said kids with cell phones kept their teachers informed about what was happening.

Kyleen said she was never too concerned about a potential risk. However, it would have been better to have simply kept students in the classroom and continue teaching rather than to have everyone in full lockdown, she said.

In the immediate aftermath of the lockdown, Brenden has clarified security procedures by establishing two different levels of lockdown.

A Level 1 lockdown requires securing classrooms and buildings from outside intrusion, but teachers would continue teaching.

A Level 2 lockdown signals a full lockdown, where doors are also locked but students and teachers make every effort to become "invisible."

School officials also learned that they will have to make provisions for extended lockdowns to meet the needs of children with special health concerns and for special-needs children, Brenden said.

"We can't have a contingency for everything," Pennington County sheriff Don Holloway said. It's vital to leave people the creativity to deal with every situation as it occurs, he said. "There's always something you never planned for."

"Ultimately, we get judged as much on the result as on the effort," Tieszen said. "There would have been more people here tonight if there would have been some shootings."

Contact Andrea Cook at 394-8423 or andrea.cook@rapidcityjournal.com