Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
‘Intruder drills’ grow in schools
Events becoming normal across US
CARMEL, Ind. — “Lockdown, lockdown, lockdown. This is a drill.”
With those seven words, calmly announced over the intercom system, an eerie silence overtook a bustling elementary school of 650 students in suburban Indianapolis. Lights were turned off and blinds shut. In some classrooms, doors were barricaded with small desks and chairs.
From start to finish, the “intruder drill” at the Forest Dale Elementary School in Carmel took about 10 minutes — an exercise now as routine at the school as a fire drill. What might sound terrifying to some parents has become the norm in many schools nationwide after a rash of school shootings.
More than two-thirds of school districts surveyed by the U.S. Government Accountability Office conduct “active shooter” exercises.
Some schools make their drills very realistic, simulating the sounds of gunshots and using smoke and fake blood. In one case, armed police officers with weapons drawn burst into a Florida middle school, terrifying staff and students alike.
Students at Forest Dale began participating in twice-a-semester intruder drills even before Connecticut’s Sandy Hook.
“We do fire drills, but we don’t expect there to be a fire,” said D.J. Schoeff, a school resource officer in Carmel and a regional director with the National Association of School Resource Officers.
But Forest Dale’s drills don’t have the effects and props that have drawn criticism elsewhere.
Playing the role of intruders, Forest Dale Principal Deanna Pitman and police officer Greg Dewald walked the halls, jiggled the doorknobs, checking for unlocked doors. A staff assistant in an office watching a monitor used the intercom to broadcast the location and description of the intruders, so staff and students could choose how to respond.
Not all schools feel the same way about the drills, and some security experts are cautious about them.
“Practice your lockdowns and diversify when you do those, different times of the day, and keep your focus on the other types of threats and dayto-day security issues without getting a tunnel vision focus on active shooters,” school safety consultant Ken Trump said.
Many schools across the country don’t have enough security cameras to capture the entire campus for potential threats, Trump added.
He said exiting the building can be risky if there is an intruder because of the uncertainty about whether there could be accomplices outside waiting. “You are leaving secure areas and evacuating into — you don’t know what,” said Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland.
But a school psychologist, Dr. Melissa Reeves, says schools need to be prepared and conduct age-appropriate exercises like the Forest Dale drill. It’s the more realistic simulation drills with props that worry Reeves.
“We do not light a fire in the hallway to practice fire drills, so why do we feel the need to bring in a fake gun, people screaming and people with makeup that looks like blood?” said Reeves, a psychologist at a school in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Jennifer Cassidy, who has a second-grader and fifth-grader at Forest Dale, says her kids never come home talking about the intruder drills.
“I don’t think that’s because they are traumatized or freaked out. I think they just think it’s just another part of school,” she said. “At first I felt like, I don’t understand why we have to do these. Then, after Sandy Hook, I was glad we do these, and I feel completely different about them.”