Strategos — Christian former cops fight a battle of wit, skill and strategy with imaginary school shooters

The classroom's desks are empty now. It's the end of the day, and the final bell has rung. The last person in the room is Lisa Butts, 43, the assistant principal at South Valley Middle School.

Butts started out as a math teacher in Pennsylvania in 1993, then moved to Missouri in 2003 to take this job with the Liberty School District. In black dress pants, heels and a sweater, she's an athletic woman with dark-blond hair. The day has been sunny and bright, but standing alone in the middle of the classroom, she senses twilight descending.

She hears the gunshots. They echo hollowly through the halls. Now comes the shouting. Her heart beats faster. She can feel the blood rushing to her head.

No one's at the door yet, but the gunfire is getting closer. Butts can make out the voices of four men as they run down the hallways, pounding on classroom doors.

She locks the door and turns off the classroom lights. Now, with the sun down, the room is black. She goes to the bookcase and pushes it away from the wall, then huddles behind it, getting as low as she can. Her face is in the dust of the floor, her knees tucked beneath her body.

Someone opens the classroom door. A bit of light streams into the front of the room. She holds her breath. A man walks in. She hears his footsteps stop near her hiding place.

"Ollie ollie oxen free," the man calls out. Then he walks back to the front of the class and turns on the lights.

Butts stands up. She wipes the dust from her clothes as best she can and comes out from behind the bookcase with a smile on her face.

This is the third time they've run this drill, and Butts is ready to start hitting back. During the next simulated school attack, she'll get to hit the intruders with a chair or fire extinguisher.

Walking into the hallway, she sees other administrators and teachers leaving classrooms, their clothes also dirty from hiding beneath desks, behind bookcases or in coat closets.

She also sees two men she has never met, their guns at their sides. Vaughn Baker and Mark Warren, along with four other men, all of them similarly armed, have been training Butts and her staff since 8 a.m.

"It was so valuable to feel yourself in that role," Butts says of the exercise. "You try to plan, but you really don't know what it's going to feel like. The reality is, you realize pretty quickly there's not a lot of places to hide in those classrooms, and if you want to protect your kids, there's only so many options you really have."

The plan to train Missouri's teachers in school-defense strategies dates back to an October 2006 morning at Memorial Middle School in Joplin. A 13-year-old boy wearing a dark-green trench coat walked into school and pointed a Mac-90 assault rifle at his classmates. Though an administrator tried to talk him out of using it, the boy fired a round into the ceiling before he was arrested. The day ended without bloodshed — mainly because the attacker's gun jammed.

After that, Paul Fennewald, coordinator with the Missouri Office of Homeland Security, started a task force to study public schools' plans in the event of a shooter. The group discovered that there were hardly any plans.

Following the April 2007 Virginia Tech massacre that left 32 dead, the task force studied Missouri's colleges. Fewer than 30 percent of schools — and 30 percent of the fire departments in their response range — had done any planning.

"That's a glaring weakness," Fennewald tells The Pitch. "If you have a catastrophe like a Virginia Tech or a Columbine, you need more than just your campus security ready to react. Some schools had great plans, but a lot didn't. There was no consistency."

For the last two years, Fennewald has been trying to get Missouri's schools prepared. He asked schools to make diagrams and submit floor plans for cops and firefighters. But those wouldn't help the teachers and students who would be trapped, waiting for help.

"We went to every agency that would have a dog in the fight to try and figure out what to do," he says. "We talked to parent-teacher groups, school counselors, nurses, first responders, you name it. And the idea to do shooter response training was one of the things to come out of all that discussion."

With the Missouri Sheriffs' Association, they agreed on what type of training they would need. Then they started accepting bids.

Beating out more than a dozen agencies across the country for the one-year, $100,000 contract were Baker and Warren, who call themselves Strategos.

In Grandview's business district, there's a warehouse with a sign that reads "Rolox Home Center." Often, no one's at the front desk. In the back is a warehouse filled with home-construction implements, stacks of insulators, and an open bay where flatbed trucks ship the company's wares. The fluorescent lights hum. It smells like plywood.

In the far back corner is a wooden staircase with no signs leading to an unmarked door.