KETCHUM — When Morgan Ballis was 25, his mother was about to enter Safeway to shop for groceries when U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in the head during a campaign event in front of the Tucson store.

Six people were killed and 12 injured by the 22-year-old shooter, who had attended high school with Ballis. 

A cement pillar was likely the reason Ballis’ mom survived, he said. Giffords survived but sustained a major brain injury.

It was 2011, and Ballis was recruiting for the U.S. Marines. 

He joined the military in 2004, right out of high school. 

Ballis served for 11 years, including two back to back deployments to Iraq where he was an infantry squad leader planning and executing combat operations in Ramadi.

He loved working as a military recruiter, and was “brutally honest” in communicating both the rewards and the risks of service to recruits and their families. 

But on the day of the Tucson shooting — Jan 8, 2011 — the trajectory of Ballis’ life changed forever.

Ballis became fixated on mass shootings, and specifically on how to prevent them.

His mother survived, but not without PTSD and extreme guilt, especially over a 9-year-old girl who was killed. 

And while Ballis didn’t know the shooter personally, he knew who he was from their time together at the same school.

Ballis wondered whether there had been warning signs, and what role the shooter’s mental health played (The shooter was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia).

In 2012, when the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took place in Connecticut, Ballis had a son in preschool and a girlfriend (now wife) who was a first grade teacher in California. 

Twenty students between the ages of six and seven were killed at Sandy Hook, along with six adults.

That’s when Ballis decided to forgo a third deployment, leave the military and devote his career to the prevention of K-12 active shootings. 

With the help of the G.I. Bill, Ballis earned his bachelor and master of science degrees in Homeland Security & Emergency Management. 

He spent countless hours pouring over the reports written after every school shooting in U.S. history. 

He started a firearms training company and a K-12 emergency management consulting firm. 

Ballis began working with schools across the country on adopting evidence-based and trauma-informed safety practices. 

By the age of 30, Ballis had established himself as a nationally recognized law enforcement trainer and “subject matter expert” in active shooter response.

Now 37, he is a Ph.D. candidate pursuing his doctorate in Emergency Management with a dissertation titled “Barriers to the Adoption of K-12 Options-Based Response Active Shooter Protocols: A qualitative study among Idaho high school administrators.”

Last winter, he made the decision to run for Blaine County sheriff. 

Ballis acknowledges the disturbing nature of spending so much time studying school shootings that seem to only increase in frequency. 

But seeing the same mistakes made over and over only makes Ballis more determined to be a part of preventing school shootings from happening as well as improving the ability of schools and law enforcement to respond.

From California to Idaho

Ballis moved to Idaho in 2020 when his wife, Desiree, was offered a job as a literacy coach with the Blaine County School District.

Within a span of two weeks, Desiree accepted the offer, and the couple sold their house in California, bought a house in Hailey, and relocated with their two children. 

Initially, Ballis was content to continue his education and consulting work remotely while being a stay-at-home dad and “becoming a ski bum.”

“It was the type of life that every warrior dreams of having one day,” he said. 

But then he was presented with a job opportunity as a school resource officer (SRO) at Wood River High.

“For me personally, what I saw was a unique opportunity to work from the inside out,” Ballis said. “I wanted to go all in on every aspect.”

As a consultant, he was approaching school safety from a relative distance. 

From the ground level, he said, “I wanted to create a model of what school safety could look like.”

Ballis, now with a teenage son, also wanted to work with kids. 

“I got into trouble as a kid,” Ballis said, describing how grateful he was to have a court-appointed mentor during a critical juncture in his life.

Ballis knows firsthand how impactful it was to have had an adult who “recognized my potential, held me accountable, and helped me achieve my goals.”

The mentorship role of an SRO, said Ballis, is at the heart of the job. 

“Our main job is to build relationships with students, staff and family members in order to gain trust.”

And for Ballis, empathy is the quality he holds highest when it comes to working with people — whether as a combat Marine, a military recruiter, an academic researcher, an SRO, or an officer of the law.

Second, the job of an SRO is to educate staff and students on school safety best practices, Ballis said. 

In addition to his day to day role at the high school, Ballis became an integral part of overhauling Blaine County School District’s emergency response protocol.

“I’m now 1000% invested,” Ballis said. “My kids are in these schools. My wife is in these schools. There’s a personal aspect. My family’s lives are on the line.”

Identifying gaps in school security measures

A few years ago, Ballis and fellow SRO Shawna Wallace began digging into the data and identifying where there were gaps and weaknesses in Blaine County’s school safety and security measures.

They transformed the “Lockdown” response protocol and mentality into the “Options-Based” protocol. 

Under the options-based response, school staff and students are trained to evaluate the situation and respond accordingly, using “Avoid,” “Deny,” or “Defend,” as the three categories for response.

Lockdown is not always the most effective response, Ballis said, and the options-based alternative is recommended by federal agencies.

There are times, for example, Ballis noted, when it is better for students to have the option to get safely out of the building, given the variables in every incident.

In a school district with about 500 employees and 3,000 students, much of Ballis’ focus is on communication. Trust, language and consistency around emergency response protocol is key, he said. “We have to get buy-in and belief in what we are doing to be effective.”

In 2023, Ballis earned the award of Hailey Police Officer of the year. Also in 2023, the Hailey Police Department was named the 2023 Model Agency of the Year by the National Association of School Resource Officers.

Ballis currently serves as president of the Idaho Association of School Resource Officers, representing 200 SRO’s across the state.

“If we could have an SRO in every school that would be phenomenal,” Ballis said. But he said more needs to be done to ensure SRO’s across Idaho have a consistently defined role, standardized training, and dedicated funding. 

He wants to see equity in emergency preparedness in schools across the state and a smart, effective, and comprehensive school safety bill based by the legislature. 

Ballis is also a strong proponent of a trauma-informed approach to drills. “It means we look at every opportunity to reduce anxiety, fear and stress with any drill specific to an active shooter.”

That means communicating appropriately about the drills ahead of time with students and staff, and identifying any students who may need extra support during a drill, he said. And a drill should never take precedent over taking care of the students.

While Ballis has spent much of his time studying and training around active shooter responses, he believes the most focus should be on prevention. 

More than 90% of K-12 school shooters have been current or former students of the school they target, Ballis said. 

“To me what that says is we have a unique opportunity to prevent 90% of all school shootings.”

In terms of current students, “We have direct contact with them on a daily basis. We have the opportunity to recognize warning signs if someone starts to go down a pathway of violence.” 

Part of that “Behavioral Assessment model,” described Ballis, is building trust, educating staff and students on when and how to report concerns, how to evaluate those reports, and then, if appropriate, how to get a student the right kind of support.

Now that Ballis is the new sheriff in town, the school district will lose an SRO with perhaps the highest level of education on school safety — and most experience training others —  in Idaho.

But Ballis only looks forward to how he can continue to best serve his community.

“We cannot out-police mental health. We cannot out-police substance abuse,” Ballis said. “And mental health and substance use are underlying driving factors of crime everywhere.”

Like in his work with school safety, Ballis also wants to put the best possible resources and evidence-based practices toward response. 

“But that doesn’t drive down crime. I believe what we miss as law enforcement leaders — is that our number one goal shouldn’t be how to respond to a crime faster, but actually how do I help the officers in our community respond less. And the only way to respond less is to address the underlying issues. . . My biggest motivation running for sheriff is to approach policing from more of a prevention standpoint.”