Military police, firefighters, medics, school staff, students and others practiced Tuesday for every parent’s worst nightmare — a school shooting at Carson Middle School.

In the scenario, a shooter hurt 15 people in the athletic wing of the school on Fort Carson, and was stopped in four minutes, officials who participated explained.

Fort Carson soldiers put their acting skills to work after receiving fake wounds, explained Emily Castro, exercise and planning specialist.

“As law enforcement arrived, they started yelling and screaming,” she described.

In the academic wing, separated by a large staircase, after initial word an incident had occurred, it went “scary silent,” as the school went into lockdown, said Montina Romero, deputy superintendent for Fountain- Fort Carson School District 8.

Then everyone in the academic wing had to practice patience, in a moment when they would feel the worst anxiety. It’s a key scenario to practice so that the school and district staff can understand how long it can take to hear from first responders.

It took about 40 minutes for communication about the shooting to reach the staff, Romero said, likely a realistic timeline. When the lockdown ended the 8th graders evacuated out into the rain.

To add more realism, the planners asked some students and staff from the largest school on base to evacuate themselves before the lockdown ending to add a challenge, Romero said.

“That added a whole new dynamic that we didn’t plan for, but was great,” she said.

Since the school is on base, Col. Erik Oksenvaag, the garrison commander was a key off-site leader. For him, the scenario started with a text message about the active shooter. From there, he was in charge of setting up the emergency operations center while working with limited information, just as he would experience in real life.

The event also offered an opportunity for Fort Carson to work with the school district on how to evacuate students and staff, and how to reunify children with families after a shooting.

It offered a chance to tackle the question: “How do we synchronize installation emergency functions with District 8 leadership and their schools,” Oksenvaag said.

While the base kept running during the exercise, should a real shooting ever happen on Fort Carson access to the base would shut down and a shelter-in-place order would go out, he explained.

While Fort Carson would certainly seem to offer one of the safest environments for a school, planning for this worst-case scenario is still important, Romero said.

“It wouldn’t be prudent of us to consider one of our schools less impacted than others,” she said.

Since the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton in 1999 there have been 428 school shootings, according to a Washington Post database.

Romero said D-8 has invested in improved safety measures such as secure entry points and school resource officers in recent years. But to ensure safety requires staff to be alert, working to recognize possible problems, such as when students might be in crisis or when an intruder is in the building.

“Most failure with school safety is human failure,” she said.