Russian teachers are to be offered training to prepare them for possible armed attacks on schools and other emergency situations through a nationwide system of courses requested by human rights ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova.
Speaking to Lower House MPs from parliamentary majority party United Russia, Moskalkova said that her aides had officially asked the Education Ministry to organize and jointly conduct special courses for school staff demonstrating best practices during armed attacks and during natural or man-made disasters.
Ms Moskalkova said that such training had previously been offered in Russian schools, but the practice was abolished and useful information and skills had been forgotten.
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“People should know how to behave in times of a terrorist attack. We should revive this training system for teachers, tell them what button should they press, how to behave, how to talk to attackers. This is a very serious topic that needs to be worked through,” the official told the lawmakers.
The move is thought to have been prompted by a string of armed attacks that took place in schools across Russia over the past few months. In one of the more recent incidents a student brought a gun to his college in the Siberian town of Barabinsk and killed another student and then himself. Two more students were injured as they jumped out of a window while fleeing the attacker.
Russian federal agency for important and resonance crime, the Investigative Committee, has said that in at least three such incidents schoolmasters and some of the teachers and pupils knew about the prepared attacks but did not believe that they would happen.
In August last year the deputy PM in charge of healthcare and social policies, Olga Golodets, said that authorities should increase the quantity of school psychologists and invest more time and resources into their training so that these specialists could foresee and prevent the attacks on schools and other manifestations of violence.
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