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.
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.
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.