I've heard a lot about them and how traumatizing they can be for children, but are they actually a widespread thing or just something a bunch of psychotic schools do to torment kids?
Stories have sprung up around the country of law enforcement officers firing blanks in hallways to demonstrate the sound of gunfire, pelting teachers with projectiles, and showing video footage from actual shootings as part of their staff training exercises. In a recent drill in Indiana, teachers were shot execution-style with plastic pellets, leaving some with welts and bruises.
That second article is wild:
One of the teachers involved in the January incident told the Indianapolis Star that police officers said to the teachers, “This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing.”
Without the teacher’s unions, it would be even worse.
Teachers really are constantly putting up with too much shit.
“Unless it’s the police shooting you, then please cower and do nothing and we might remember to spare you.”
Friendly reminder that this is your brain on Just World Fallacy. The self-righteous pigs genuinely believe that if something bad happens to you, then it must be because you failed to do the right thing
I got out of high school right as shooter drills were starting, but I was there during terrorist drills. We were instructed there could be bombings at any moment from "terrorists" so we did things like hunker against walls. We did a few shooter drills that involved cops marching the halls and students barricading doors, but they weren't taken seriously. My school had an attitude that if any school shooters showed up, there would be students who brought their own guns so we wouldn't have to worry. It was considered normal in my town to always have a gun. One of my classmates kept a shotgun in his locker. It was bizarre and I hated it.
I used to work at the preschool connected to my school district. I doubt that small preschools do drills, but we did. We would huddle in the bathrooms connected to our classrooms and tell the kids we had to be quiet because we were playing hide and go seek with Mrs. (Principal) and if she found us, we'd lose. Keeping 15-20 kids aged 3-5 quiet in a bathroom went about as well as you'd think. At least the kids weren't traumatized because they thought it was a game, but the framing of "if we get found, we lose" had the teachers feeling pretty :doomjak:
:jesus-christ: we didn't even have fire alarm drills that often
I taught at a school in Arizona that told kids to zigzag if they are in the halls. Heartbreaking.
I'm just imagining a bunch of kids running into each other trying to escape bullets.
When the kids evade the school shooter by building a tower out of 3 wings of the school
:jesus-christ:
A lot of people have guns in Switzerland, yet no mass shooting "culture" like in America. Seem to be multiple variables to this issue
I did this once in 13 years and never again. It was pretty much how the other poster described. One detail I remember is that our teacher, an older women maybe 5'2", stood right next to the door with a big lamp as like a weapon to bash the shooter with.
We did them like once a year going to school in the 2010s. Kinda scary when in grade school, but sort of numb and gallows humor opportunity in high school.
Can concur, they'd call out "lockdown lockdown lockdown", the teacher would lock the door and shut off the lights, and members of admin would go through and check the doors
I'm an :chomsky-yes-honey: so I was last in public school many years ago. We would have them maybe twice a year, they would make announcements using code phrases and the teachers were trained to know what they meant (either shooter outside the building or inside the building).
EDIT: Now that I think of it, I went to public school in the era that was actually the immediate fallout of Columbine, so I presume this was a fairly novel practice. I guarantee it's way more dystopian now.
I bet things have escalated since I graduated high school in 2016, but I didn't think they were a big deal. Once a month we'd have a fire drill, where we'd practice evacuating the building, and maybe twice a year we'd have an "active shooter drill" where we'd practice locking the door and being quiet for 10 minutes. Some faculty would roam the halls and pull on the door handles to check if they're locked (which could be scary tbh)
At that point though, the idea that an active shooter situation could happen at OUR school was pretty theoretical. Since it was a New York school we probably spent more time asking kids to think about what they'd do if they were there on 9/11
We did a two or three a year. Sometimes they were "real" in the sense that something potentially dangerous was happening within a mile or so. One time it was "real" in the sense that there was a strange man with some sort of large tool trying to come into the school. Once or twice we heard banging during the lockdown and I suspect they were checking lockers for drugs.
