Educators say to stop lifelike active shooter drills — they’re too scary for students
In deciding how the Raytown School District would teach students what to do should an intruder with a gun enter their building, Travis Hux was reminded of a school drill that rattled students several years ago.
Hux, assistant superintendent of support services in Raytown, was an assistant principal in the early 2000s working in a small Missouri town. He decided he would create a “real-to-life” scenario there to show students how serious a school fire might be.
Hux said he had smoke machines and emergency responders with helicopters show up. He even had students, who were in on the re-enactment, rolled away on stretchers. Hux said he went so far because he believed students had grown so accustomed to fire drills that he worried the drills were not being taken seriously.
But that lifelike drill, he said, proved to be “too much.” Hux said that while he was trying to make it entertaining it was “too emotional” for many students and even some of the adults. He said some students were in tears. “It was a little more intense than it needed to be,” he said.
Hux feels the same way about putting students through full-out active shooter drill simulations that include air gun shootings, faked blood and a pretend masked intruder roaming the school hallways. What Hux learned back in his assistant principal days other school leaders across the nation have also discovered. And now they are speaking out against involving kids in school shooter simulation exercises.
In a report out this month, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, two of the largest such unions, joined Everytown for Gun Safety in calling for schools to reevaluate the use of active shooter drill simulations.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 95% of the nation’s public schools — including schools in the Kansas City area — conduct some form of regular active shooter safety drills. The drills are required in 40 states.
But the thinking now is that those drills that include active shooter simulations are not all that effective for kids and in some cases may cause more harm than good. That’s why educators in the Kansas City area said they don’t include students in those more realistic drills.
“What these drills can really do is potentially trigger either past trauma or trigger such a significant physiological reaction that it actually ends up scaring the individuals instead of better preparing them to respond in these kinds of situations,” Melissa Reeves, former president of the National Association of School Psychologists, said in the report.
Laurel Williams, chief of psychiatry at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, goes further: “If you’re constantly given the viewpoint that the world is scary and unpreventable things happen, it pervasively makes us less secure as a society... We see everyone as suspicious, and it changes the way we act around people.”
The Indianapolis Star reported in March that during a drill at an elementary school in Monticello, Indiana, law enforcement officers lined teachers up and “shot them” with Airsoft rifle pellets, which caused panic even among the adults.
No schools in the Kansas City area have reported such hysteria during active shooter drills, and while most said they do shooter-in-the-school simulations with faculty and staff, none said they currently conduct such real-life shooter drills with students involved.
“We are shifting gears a bit,” Hux said. “It’s not just important to keep kids safe, but also important to help them feel safe.”
What should schools practice?
Missouri and Kansas educators said they know crisis drills designed to prepare students, teachers and staff for an active shooter are being done in a variety of forms throughout the two states, and some are more intense than others.
Last year Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed a bill that reduced the number of fire, tornado and crisis drills, down from 16 to nine. The law, which took effect in July, mandates three lock-down scenario drills. The previous law required schools to do as many as nine crisis drills a year.
The law does not call for active shooter drills, but rather lockdowns that are generally handled by the individual buildings and are announced a few moments before they begin.
“I think the goal is to teach students how to react properly and not to treat it like a pop quiz,” said Mark Jones, political director for the Missouri National Education Association.
A 2013 Missouri law mandates that all school personnel participate in active shooter drills but does not specify what those drills should look like.
In Lee’s Summit, for example, lockdown drills requiring students and staff to follow procedures related to an intruder are held twice a year.
“The district does not simulate gunfire with students, nor does a person pose as an active shooter during these drills,” said Katy Bergen, a district spokeswoman.
But staff-only training every two years does simulate an active shooter.
What is important, Jones said, is that the drills are announced before they begin and are “age appropriate with professionals around to walk students through what they should and should not do so that they feel more prepared and they feel safe.”
Marcus Baltzell, a spokesman for the Kansas National Education Association, agrees and takes the conversation further, saying “we don’t believe that guns should be in schools so the things we advocate for are real policies that make our schools safe from gun violence. Policies that would prevent armed people who would do harm from ever getting a gun and entering campus.”
“If we get to the point where the only solution we can come up with is an unannounced active shooter simulation, and that becomes the norm, then we have failed,” he said.
A white paper published by Everytown makes a similar recommendation, including that student drills should not include simulations that mimic an actual incident, and that schools should couple drills with trauma-informed approaches to address students’ well-being and track data about the effectiveness of such drills.
Expenses soar, but research lags
Twenty years ago, Colorado’s deadly Columbine shooting led school officials across the country to put plans in place. After the mass killing at Virginia Tech in 2007, schools started talking about text notification systems, alerts and having armed security on the premises. When schoolchildren were murdered by a gun-toting intruder at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in 2012, districts spent millions to construct new school entrances that funnel visitors into an enclosed buzz-in-only entry.
That year, for example, Blue Valley schools began spending roughly $20 million to reconstruct entrances on the district’s 38 buildings. Just last month the district passed a $186 million bond issue that included money for improved school security.
Then on Valentine’s Day in 2018, a gunman opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. Shooter intruder scenario simulations became more common.
A $2.7 billion dollar industry — elaborate door locking and door jamming tools, high-tech surveillance, school entry re-configurations and pricey school intruder training firms — also grew up around the anguish of parents and school staff and their desperate feeling that something must be done.
But the truth, Everytown says, is there is limited research available on drills. And because of the enormous variety of the types of drills conducted in schools across the country it is “difficult to measure and compare effects.”
Raytown, which has a policy that all classroom doors are kept closed and locked all day, every day, boasts it is among the best prepared districts in the country to respond in the event a gun-toting intruder makes his or her way into a school building.
The district spent $150,000 to purchase 1,200 Barracuda door stops for each classroom And while the district holds at least two lock-down drills a year with students, its shooter simulation drills are for teachers and staff but not for students.
“Our goal is first for students to learn basic practices to assist in the overall plan to react to the intruder responsibly, safely,” Hux said. “I believe that participation in drills helps students understand that there is a plan in place.“
For the most part, he said, during the drills students are given a lesson that reminds them about what the protocol calls for — “lights out, blinds closed, phones off, cover door windows, and move against a wall out of the line of sight. We talk them through that. We feel like we can educate without traumatizing.”
This story was originally published February 16, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
