Perspective: School shootingLockdown: Living Through the Era of School Shootings, One Drill at a Time.

Ninety-five percent of American schools now conduct drills to prepare students for a school shooter. Elizabeth Brocklin writes in The Trace that “For adults who were out of high school by the time of the 1999 Columbine shooting, this is an unfamiliar phenomenon. We don’t have a clear picture of how the drills are experienced by the children they were designed for.”

She writes that in partnership between Slate and The Trace, they spoke to more than twenty students from different parts of the country, to learn what they see, hear, and feel during what has become a routine experience in American schools.

Shee adds:

We turned those experiences into an audio story you can listen to in the audio player just below, or on your preferred podcast app. You can also scroll further to read and hear selections from the kids we spoke to, kindergartners and high school seniors alike, as they describe how these drills frighten and bore, annoy and perplex. Every school performs the drills in a different way, and every child experiences them alone. But even the younger students know better than we might expect what the drills are for. Here are their stories.

Here is what Phoebe, a 5^th grader from South Orange, New Jersey, said

“I repeat, this is a code red lockdown drill.” I was so scared. I stood on top of the toilet, but then I remembered my teacher told me this year to sit on the toilet and put my feet up. And then last year, my teacher told me to stand on the toilet. So I was like, wait, what do I do? I was panicking. Then I heard footsteps outside. I was like, oh my gosh, is someone coming? I tried to stay as quiet as I could be… I just hear footsteps, click-clack, click-clack… and then I heard the shifting of the doorknob, and I was like oh my gosh, what’s going to happen? I was just hoping… hoping that it was the principal coming, not anybody that was going to kill me.