School shooter drills draw flak
New report warns of traumatic effect on students, urges additional research and team approach
School employees lie on the floor during an active-shooter drill in Ohio. (Shutterstock)
By Ted Cox
Two leading national teachers’ unions have joined a grassroots gun-safety group in questioning school active-shooter drills and urging more research on the subject.
The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association joined the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund Tuesday in issuing a white paper on “The Impact of School Safety Drills for Active Shootings.” It argues there is “scant evidence” the drills do much good, and that they can be “counterproductive” in producing trauma in students who become anxious about incidents that remain for the most part extremely isolated.
The paper takes pains not to minimize that school shootings have been a growing social concern since the Columbine, Colo., mass shooting in 1999, followed by rampages at Virginia Tech in 2008, at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb on Valentine’s Day the following year, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn., in 2012, and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., two years ago, again on Valentine’s Day — just to name the most infamous incidents. Yet it also points out that “only 0.2 percent of the approximately 36,000 gun deaths a year occur on school grounds.”
An estimated 95 percent of schools across the nation now take part in active-shooter drills, and Illinois passed a law last year calling for districts to “conduct at least one law-enforcement drill that addresses an active threat or an active shooter within a school building.”
“Quite honestly, the idea that we have to do a shooter drill just makes me so, so sad,” said Kathi Griffin, president of the NEA-affiliated Illinois Education Association, the largest educators’ union in the state with 135,000 members.
Griffin, like national administrators, recognizes the call for schools to take action in the wake of those mass shootings. Yet the new white paper points out that “although nearly all students and educators experience drills, and a $2.7 billion dollar industry has grown up around the anguish of parents and school staff and the desperate feeling that we must ‘do something,’ there is extremely limited research available on drills’ effectiveness.”
The paper states: “While there is almost no research affirming the value of these drills for preventing school shootings or protecting the school community when shootings do occur, stories abound in the media of incidents where students, educators, and staff have experienced distress and sometimes lasting trauma as a result of active shooter drills.”
The paper recommends a team approach involving mental-health professionals, school administrators and teachers, and parents, in order to prioritize that students feel safe even while practicing for a calamity, just as with tornado and fire drills.
Griffin said it’s important to make sure that “when schools put these in place, that they take steps that these drills don’t do more harm than good.”
She added that it’s only common sense that parents be notified ahead of time, and that it’s made clear to students that it’s a drill. “If you let them know it’s a drill, then they’re going to be not quite so fearful, because what they see on the news when this type of thing happens is so violent and traumatic,” Griffin said.
“We just want to make sure that our students’ safety is protected, yet at the same time we don’t want to traumatize them,” Griffin said. “We want to make sure that they’re safe, but we don’t want them traumatized by it. That’s the big deal.”
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We just want to make sure that our students’ safety is protected, yet at the same time we don’t want to traumatize them.”
IEA President Kathi Griffin (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
Griffin echoed the report in stating that drills need to be designed in “a way that’s the least-traumatic possible,” and to emphasize that “school is a safe place.”
The new white paper builds on a report the groups issued last year on “Keeping Our Schools Safe.” That made eight recommendations, primarily focusing on preventive gun-control measures such as passing extreme-risk laws and background checks on gun sales, while raising the age to buy semiautomatic weapons and encouraging secure gun storage. Only then did it suggest creating “evidence-based threat assessments in schools,” implementing “expert-endorsed security plans,” and initiating “effective, trauma-informed emergency planning.”
The new paper focuses on those school initiatives, urging the need for comprehensive research on the subject and pointing out that “mental-health professionals have begun warning about the effect of these drills on students’ well-being and about the possible short- and long-term consequences on school performance and physical and mental health.”
It urges transparent, open collaboration between experts, administrators, teachers, and parents to arrive at drills that emphasize overall school safety. One of its original recommendations is that there is no need to have someone mimicking a shooter to have a drill, just as there’s no need for an actual tornado or fire in those school drills.
Griffin also echoed the paper in urging that the drills be “age-appropriate” across the range from pre-kindergarten through high school, adding, “A preschooler, a high-school senior — you can’t do the same thing, as well as how you explain it” to them. The paper recommends compiling reports on the drills themselves to study the impact they have on students going forward.
The hope is that the phenomenon of school shootings subsides over time, so that active-shooter drills can become a thing of the past, like “duck and cover” nuclear-bomb drills in the postwar era. Griffin acknowledged that it’s critical for students to be aware and prepared, but she pointedly added that, if a gunman gains access to a school and “if the drills are put into action, honestly, we’ve already failed.”