Active shooter drills became one of the most common school safety measures implemented nationwide in recent years, despite widespread fears that the procedures heighten anxiety, and evidence that school shooters, like the one in Parkland, Florida, use knowledge of the drills to their advantage. Teachers unions in February called for schools to not conduct active shooter drills with students. Now, new research adds data to those concerns.
A report released Thursday, obtained in advance by NBC News, found active shooter drills in schools correlated with a 42 percent increase in anxiety and stress and a 39 percent increase in depression among those in the school community, including students, teachers and parents, based on their social media posts.
You haven't seen dark until you've done an active shooter drill at the district preschool. Herding 15-20 kids aged 3-5 into the bathroom and telling them to be very quiet because we're playing hide and seek with Mrs. [Principal's Name] and if she finds us, we lose.
Yeah, we lose if we get found all right. And you look around at those wiggily little kids and you know that there's no way in hell that, if there really was an active shooter, you could keep them quiet and still long enough. And you know that you have to do your best to keep them alive anyhow.
Some high schoolers come to work part days there and take classes on childhood development to get a licence by high school graduation. Last year, one of the girls was like, "if there's a shooter, I'm running." and I was like, well, shit. She's a kid too. Do I expect her to stick around and protect the babies? How? She can die with us I guess, or she can jump out the window like she planned and take off running (yeah, she checked. She can fit through that window.) I can't be mad at her for that.
The school nurse recommends each teacher keep a stash of emergency suckers so you can pop one in each little mouth when it's REALLY time to be quiet, and hope that distracts them enough to be quiet and still. She was like, "you know how I feel about candy, but this is more important than cavities."
So we're playing hide and seek and keeping an emergency stash of candy to try and keep the kids alive, if the worst happens. I can't describe to you how that incongruity makes me feel.
Teachers can pull Sharpies out of pockets the way magicians produce rabbits. I normally have two or three rattling around the bottom of my laptop bag. I was once in line at Starbucks when the Sharpie marker being shared between three baristas ran out of ink. They rummaged under the registers, desperately looking for a replacement before the caffeine-deprived hordes turned on them. I felt like a badass superhero when I stepped to the counter and offered three different colors for them to pick from.
But I’m thinking about one Sharpie pen in particular. It’s black, medium thickness. And it stays in the blue emergency bag that I keep on the filing cabinet closest to my classroom door. Our school’s emergency bags are remarkably sparse. No band-aids, no first aid materials. We have one flashlight, one sign with my name to help my students find our class if they get separated during a mass exodus, one copy of my class rosters, and one Sharpie marker. Why a marker? Someone asked that very question at a staff meeting. The nurse explained, in a completely emotionless tone, that the Sharpie was so we could identify students and write their names on their bodies in the event of an incident...
That Sharpie tells me everything I need to know about teaching through COVID. We could have poured resources into prevention. We could’ve spent all summer enforcing mask use and social distancing. We could’ve sacrificed small pleasures for the greater good. We could’ve kept this from happening. But instead, we’re blindly barreling toward reopening even though we know teachers and students will die. We’re going to treat COVID the same way we treat school shootings. An unfortunate but unavoidable cost to doing business. There will be some new morbid addition to the emergency bag. Some simple tool made macabre by the expectation for its use. And like we always do, we will ask our teachers to stand in the doorways and use our bodies as human shields. And if we make it out alive, we’ll be the ones tasked with walking through the wreckage and counting the bodies.
Remind me, why don’t you just barricade the doors? It seems having decent locks would fix half of the issue.
Alternatively, chuck the kids out the windows and run for it.
Hiding from a school shooter seems pretty challenging.
The bathrooms are inside our classrooms (preschoolers need to pee all the time), so there's a locked door between us and the hallway. That locked door would slow someone down, but a determined person could get through. The idea is to turn off the lights and hide in the bathroom so the shooter doesn't know where people are. (We have pretty curtains to cover our windows, in case of emergency. There's a whole cottage industry of curtains for teachers so we can hopefully hide our kids.) Of course, people are in just about every room in the building, so how effective is that strategy, really? I have my doubts. I've thought about passing kids out the window and telling them to run, but imagine a flock of chickens being told to run in a certain direction, and you'll have an idea of how I think it would go. If they were older, sure.
Remind me, why don’t you just barricade the doors? It seems having decent locks would fix half of the issue.
Time to set-up plus bullets can go through the doors pretty easy depending on the caliber. A teacher alone (in pre-school) isn't gonna be able to chuck enough things at the door as fast as middle-school/high-school kids and the teacher can.
Tillie mentions the locks, which would be pretty quick to do, but throwing small child-sized tables/chairs etc. would take longer with 1-2 people than 5+ people.
I've been saying it for years. Having 10 kids get shot vs 15 kids get shot isn't going to make up for the anxiety and depression you're giving tens of millions of children - school shootings are so rare, that if you increase teen and young adult suicides even marginally, it can QUICKLY surpass school shootings by a mile.
I had to do a school shooter drill in college and it was pretty fucking weird and needless. It made going back into that room weird. You'd always think of someone bursting through the door and lighting you up. I can't imagine explaining to a fucking 6 year old that they need to learn how to make it slightly, slightly harder for someone to blow their fucking head off.
These drills are designed for school administration to jerk themselves off and pretend they've done something positive.
These drills are designed for school administration to jerk themselves off and pretend they’ve done something positive.
Plus I think some of them are conducted by veterans and cops who are hired for their "expertise" so it's also basically chud welfare.
Most school shooters go to the school that they're shooting up so these drills just tell the shooter where everyone is going to be anyway
Wonder why literally no other country on Earth feels the need to do this.
Oh well, it's a problem that can't possibly be solved no matter what we do.
Yep, never ever.
Eh, don't give Canada too much credit. Still had to do those drills growing up there too.
i remember when i was in the 6th grade they told us about school shooters and went into a ton of detail about columbine and i just started crying in class.
and i remember looking at the adults and being pissed at them for acting like this was so normal, talking about the reality of being shot by someone.
and this was in fucking 2005
We had the sister of a Columbine victim come to speak at our school around '05 or '06
It was more akin to trauma porn than a coherent strategy for dealing with a problem. My teacher wouldn't stop talking about how "inspiring" the speaker was, completely ignoring multiple people, including myself, who just broke down in an auditorium full of people upon hearing the horrors that this person had to deal with, without any strategies being offered to cope with those emotions.
The Parkland students' ability to organize after what happened to them is what has impressed me the most.
I am wondering if schools have to provide the dates and times of shooter drills. I am planning on removing my child from school on those days, precisely to avoid this hellish nightmare.
I used to volunteer at a summer camp for trans kids (cause like, holy shit imagine trying to go to a summer camp surrounded by cis kids). The camp is, quite literally, in a secret location - for safety purposes. We couldn't even let them keep their phones or cameras (since social media posts might out someone who was in the closet back home, among other concerns).
After the aurora shooting the folks in charge ultimately decided on having safety drills - specifically in the case of someone from outside attempting to enter and do harm - mostly involving various locations hidden in the woods. It was certainly done with good intentions but like, god, it was not a good time. We were told to pretend it was a fire drill but like, obviously none of the kids older than like 10 bought that story.
I'm an adult and it fucked me up. As far as I'm aware the camp never did the drills again after that one year. You'd have to be completely oblivious to try and do that kind of thing again after actually seeing the results. Its hard to want to want to repeat it after seeing the faces of the kids forcibly imagining the idea of someone trying to murder them for being trans, you know?
Anyways hellworld just keeps rolling on I guess, I wonder if they'll actually manage to stop the drills from happening. Isn't there like, literally a whole new chud industry built around providing "realistic" drills in schools?
We love blindly rushing into things and only begrudgingly admitting that they have horrible repercussions decades later, don't we folks?
