School safetyDo Lockdown Drills Do Any Good?

By Jaclyn Schildkraut

Published 26 November 2019

School lockdown drills and exercises are controversial today, due in large part to some troubling examples making headlines. Parents who fear that these experiences could be traumatizing their children say that rather than reduce the harm caused during mass shootings, dramatic approaches cause harm by amplifying students’ fears about the danger of being shot at school. This raises a good question I seek to answer through my research: Is it possible to be prepared without being scared?

School lockdown drills and exercises are controversial today, due in large part to some troubling examples making headlines.

Teachers in Monticello, Indiana, for example, were hurt when they got shot in the back with plastic pellets.

Students in Franklin, Ohio, were exposed to sounds of simulated gunfire.

Sometimes, role-playing kids and teens, covered in fake blood, are scattered throughout their schools – screaming.

Parents who fear that these experiences could be traumatizing their children are objecting and calling for schools to stop holding them. Rather than reduce the harm caused during mass shootings, they say, dramatic approaches cause harm by amplifying students’ fears about the danger of being shot at school.

This raises a good question I seek to answer through my research: Is it possible to be prepared without being scared?

Holding Emergency Drills
Today, more than 95 percent of public schools conduct lockdown drills. They became considerably more commonplace and focused on active attacker situations after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, in which 12 students and a teacher were murdered.

But U.S. schools have held emergency preparedness drills for decades.

In the 1950s, they practiced duck-and-cover drills in preparedness for the atomic attacks Americans feared would occur during the Cold War.

Fire drills became commonplace in schools after 1958. A student in a Chicago parochial school in that year started a fire in the building’s boiler room, killing 93 students and two teachers.

Across the nation, students, faculty and staff participate in drills to prepare for earthquakes and tornadoes without hesitation or second thoughts. They have become routine.

So why is resistance to lockdown drills apparently on the rise?

Doing Research
There are two key reasons why there is such an aversion to lockdown drills. The first comes from a muddling of two things that are related but not the same: exercises and drills.

Exercises incorporate realistic sights and sounds, such as the simulated screaming and bleeding that might occur during a mass shooting.

Drills, on the other hand, only require practice, such as evacuating a building or locking doors and getting as many people as possible out of sight.

During fire drills, for example, nobody sets schools on fire to make them seem more realistic. Instead, everyone practices how to respond so that it’s easier to do the right thing in a frightening situation.