Nearly all schools now hold Lockdown or active-shooter drills, reports the National Center for Education Statistics.
Active-shooter drills and lockdowns are terrifying children for no good reason, writes Erika Christakis in The Atlantic.
Educators and safety experts have urged students to deploy such unlikely self-defense tools as hockey pucks, rocks, flip-flops, and canned food. More commonly, preparations include lockdown drills in which students sit in darkened classrooms with the shades pulled. Sometimes a teacher or a police officer plays the role of a shooter, moving through the hallway and attempting to open doors as children practice staying silent and still.
These drills aren’t limited to the older grades. Around the country, young children are being taught to run in zigzag patterns so as to evade bullets. I’ve heard of kindergartens where words like barricade are added to the vocabulary list, as 5- and 6-year-olds are instructed to stack chairs and desks “like a fort” should they need to keep a gunman at bay. In one Massachusetts kindergarten classroom hangs a poster with lockdown instructions that can be sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”: Lockdown, Lockdown, Lock the door / Shut the lights off, Say no more. Beside the text are picture cues—a key locking a door; a person holding up a finger to hush the class; a switch being flipped to turn off the lights.
Today’s children are seen as “incredibly vulnerable—to hurt feelings, to non-rubberized playground surfaces, to disappointing report cards,” she writes. Often children aren’t allowed to take the moderate risks that build resilience. Yet, they’re expected to fight off armed attackers.
Deaths from school shootings are extremely rare, she writes. In nearly 20 years since the 1999 Columbine massacre, 150 students and adults have been killed in school shootings, reports the Washington Post.
“Hardening” schools may do more harm than good, write Bryan R. Warnick and Ryan Kapa in Education Next.
Mass shootings have prompted the target hardening of schools through the expansion of technologies such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras, the deployment of school resource officers (SROs), and the implementation of lockdown procedures and “run-hide-fight” training.
“The target-hardening approach sends messages of fear, insecurity, and mistrust,” and may undercut school’s education mission, they write. By contrast, schools can support their core mission — and prevent attacks by creating “communities that listen, build trust, and provide open channels of communication.”
Warnick and Kapa see “threat assessment” as an effective way to make schools safer.
. . . teams of school personnel, law enforcement officers, and members of other relevant professions, such as social workers, systematically assess threatening student behavior to determine the nature and severity of the threat. Threat assessment, which is designed to distinguish between serious and non-serious threats, helps authorities avoid both overreacting and under-reacting. Thus, it reduces the need for automatic long-term suspension or expulsion for threatening behavior.
“Instead of simply hardening schools against attack, educators should focus on building school environments characterized by mutual trust, active listening, respect for student voices and expression, cooperativeness, and caring relationships with and among students,” they conclude. “These measures not only make schools safer, they also make schools better.”
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