By Summer Crawford

News Editor

@summercrawfordd

It is a quiet, rainy night and you walk out into the nearly empty parking lot alone, the only sound being your feet clicking the ground. As you approach the dimly lit light post, you notice a dark figure coming towards you and you panic. You cannot breathe, you have no idea what to do and no one is around to help.

Situations just like these and worse are the exact reason that the Coppell Police Department started working with Coppell High School 11 years ago to offer not only self defense classes for adult women, but also classes for senior girls in high school. CHS and New Tech High@Coppell offer and encourage senior girls to take the six week self defense class every Wednesday at the Coppell Middle School East gym from 6-8 p.m. The first class of 2015 was on Jan. 21.

With the largest turnout of the course’s existence, the first class educated over 65 girls. Several police officers and student resource officers (SROs) were present to stress the importance of understanding how to get out of dangerous situations and defend oneself. Officer Peter Dirks, who normally leads the class, was unable to attend but was replaced by Officer Casey Sessions.

“The one common thing that happens in any assault situation, is the victim always says, ‘I never thought it would happen to me, I always thought it would be someone else,’” Sessions said. “We don’t want you to have that mindset, we want you to have the mindset of, ‘It could happen to me, but we are going to make you a tough target to where hopefully you can prevent it.’ This is a great class, we have actually had ladies and a former Coppell student [who] took this class when she was a senior and she had to use [our techniques] when she went off to college.”

The class objective is to help high school senior girls avoid becoming victims through mental awareness and physical preparedness. According to Sessions, every girl should understand how to protect herself because sometimes, no one else can, or will, help.

“Coppell is a real nice city and I’m sure everybody here feels reasonably safe. It’s good that you feel safe, but we can’t be everywhere. Your personal safety starts with you, and you have a right to defend yourself and the law gives you a right to defend yourself up to deadly force if it’s necessary,” Sessions said.

The officers started the class by sharing stories of girls who successfully used the skills taught to them in order to escape assaults with their lives.

“One of the teachers stopped me in one of the schools whose daughter took [the class] when she was a senior. She was visiting a college campus with a friend of hers, and I guess she found herself in a situation where she had to fight off a sexual assault,” New Tech High@Coppell SRO R.J. Harr said. “She came out a little bruised, a little battered, but as her mom said, she used what we taught her to get away from that situation.”

“What we teach makes a difference. In her life, it actually made a difference. So now she is what we call a survivor, not a victim.”

A big part of the class focused on how drastically life will change next year when the girls are away from home. The main lesson was centered around a four letter acronym.

“We have an acronym that we use, [for the] four key elements of self defense, and we use the acronym of BADD. Be a tough target, Attract attention, Deny privacy, Do something,” Sessions said.

Girls were encouraged to be a tough target by paying attention to their surroundings, walking with confidence and recognizing areas of danger. In order to attract attention, one should make noise and scream, all the while remembering to breathe. To deny privacy, girls were told to never go into secluded areas alone, and should always do something in a dangerous situation, whether that be “fight or flight.”

A lot of the attendees found the class to be extremely helpful and learned vital skills. An exciting part of the class was actually getting to practice a series of punches and kicks.

“We learned the precautions that should be taken to prevent an attack and started to practice a few strategies that could help us fight off an attacker,” CHS senior Atiya Chinwalla said. “I’m really excited to learn more comprehensive techniques that I can use to fight back during a threatening situation.”