"You only listen to me and nobody else," he said in a hushed tone. "Even if it sounds like your mother coming, I don't care."
Five minutes later, school Principal Sherry Stockhamer made another announcement: The drill was over, the coast was clear and students could emerge from their classrooms to watch the officers practice pulling an injured colleague from the school's courtyard.
For several hours, about 25 Glendale SWAT team officers practiced sweeping the campus in groups of four during a hypothetical shooting incident not unlike the massacre at Virginia Tech University in April in which 32 students were shot to death by their 23-year-old fellow-student, Seung-hu Cho.
"We don't want to be naïve about it — to think that this will never happen to us," said Glendale Police Sgt. Oscar Rodriguez, who oversees the pool of school resource officers stationed at all middle and high schools in the Glendale Unified School District.
All schools in the district have their own emergency plans. They practice lockdown drills twice a year, but this was the first time a police squad had performed tactical training on a campus still in session, officials said.
"In a crisis, we revert to our training," said Glendale Police Capt. Lief Nicolaisen, who was on hand to review the drill.
Daily High School was chosen as a test case for the drill because of its relatively small size and for its different features, like an infant day-care facility for student moms, which currently houses nine babies, Stockhamer said.
"We're happy to do our part," she said.
For the students who lined the second-story railing around the school's courtyard Wednesday afternoon, the drill was just as reassuring as it was exciting.
