LYNN – With three rings of the fire alarm, the Fallon Elementary School was in a full-fledged lockdown. Lights went off in every classroom, and within seconds students and teachers huddled against the wall, out of sight, hopefully out of mind.After a quiet click of Principal Stanley Serwacki’s door, there was nothing but silence – an eerie silence, unfamiliar for the halls of an elementary school on a Wednesday in February.Moments later, with the halls filled with police, three more rings of the alarm signaled “all clear,” and veteran Lynn Police Officer Robert Ferrari went to work critiquing the school staff, along with his police colleagues on their reaction to the lockdown situation.On this day, the lockdown was merely an exercise. Students and staff knew it was coming, and knew there were no crazed gunmen, or escaped convicts roaming the halls of their school. But in a violent world, fighting a frightening trend of school violence on a seemingly weekly basis, knowing what do if the situation is real could mean the difference between an isolated incident and a bloody massacre.A former School Resource Officer, Ferrari is now the czar of school safety in Lynn. A grant from the U.S Department of Education brought with it the title and responsibility of School Security and Emergency Planning Liaison, meaning Ferrari is responsible for the safety and security of all 30 school buildings in the city.More than an SRO, Ferrari is in charge of security and safety planning, meaning he spends his days working on lockdown plans for every school building, and physically training staff and administration on new security procedures.Starting at the top, with an administrative crisis management team run through the office of Superintendent Nicholas Kostan, Ferrari has a group of staff at every school designated as the emergency response team. There is an individual, personalized plan for every building, and stacks of procedural paperwork to go along with them.Teachers and principals are provided with flip-chart guides in every classroom, taking an “all hazards approach” to school safety.”It is about the school, the students and the staff and creating a safe, secure school department that is conducive to learning,” said Ferrari. “We have a lot of smart kids and responsible kids, and we want them to become socially responsible members of our community.”While unique to every school building, the lockdown procedures are handled in similar ways across the board. Along with students and teachers, Ferrari requires the officers that would be first to respond to an emergency call attend the training, so that they know what the inside of the building looks like, and what to expect in the event of a real attack.After the lockdown is complete, Ferrari meets with the officers and principal of the school to go over a school performance checklist, critiquing everything from response time to whether staff followed proper procedure.The meeting allows officers to discuss what the staff did wrong, but also talk about individual challenges at each school before they create a problem in an actual situation.”The thinking is that everyone gets the same training because you don’t know about staff changes. But every school building is different, so we want to have individual plans for every building,” he said. “The elementary schools are a little different than the middle and high schools because you don’t have as many people moving around the hallways, but a lot of these buildings are much older, so that creates its own challenges.”The response to Ferrari’s training has been overwhelming. Beyond simple classroom training, every principal in the city has taken and become certified in FEMA’s National Incident Management System, and every staff member will have comprehensive lockdown training before the year is over.”I am proud that we were able to pull that off, it is pretty cool to have that kind of cooperation across the board,” said Ferrari.GangsThe three major ar