Feeling the psychological impact of school shooter drills
When active-shooter drills frighten the children they hope to protect
After the first day of school at Mark T. Sheehan High School in Wallingford, Conn., Mackenzie Bushey, a 15-year-old junior, came home upset that a teacher enforced a no-cellphones policy by confiscating students’ phones before class. She needed her cell, Mackenzie told her family last month, to notify police should a gunman attack her school.
And also, she said, “to say my final goodbye to you.”
Mackenzie’s mother, Brenda Bushey, blames her daughter’s fears on monthly active-shooter drills at Sheehan High. “I understand they’re trying to think about the children’s best interests,” Bushey said in an interview. “But you can’t help but think of how it’s affecting them.”
Nearly every American public school now conducts lockdown drills — 96 percent in 2015 and 2016 — according to the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. Law enforcement officials and many school administrators say they are crucial for preparing and safeguarding students, but methods vary widely and now include drills that child trauma experts say do little more than terrify already anxious children.
“A whole new cottage industry has emerged where people who don’t know anything about kids are jumping in and adapting protocols for groups like police officers or people preparing for combat,” said Bruce Perry, founder of the ChildTrauma Academy, whose clinical team assists maltreated and traumatized children through counseling, research and education. As a result, Perry said in an interview, “The number of developmentally uninformed, child uninformed and completely stupid ideas is mind-numbing.”
The news media attention and policy debate surrounding school shootings, and the heartbreaking details of massacres like Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland, heighten the perceived risk among parents and students alike. After the shooting last year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., nearly 60 percent of American teenagers said they were very or somewhat worried about a mass shooting at school, a similar proportion as parents, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.
In fact, while the vast majority of gun-related homicides involving children occur in the United States, only a tiny percentage occur on school grounds. But August’s spate of mass shootings, including in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Odessa and Midland, Texas, have lent urgency to a flood of new preparedness efforts.
“Every shooting event brings a spike in contacts by people who say ‘We need to be doing something,’ ” said Greg Crane, founder of the ALICE Training Institute, which teaches seminars for school officials and law enforcement, who then run their own drills.
The number of armed assailant drills in American public schools increased after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, when the Education Department changed its active-shooter response recommendations from sheltering in place to “options-based” approaches like “run, hide, fight” — training created for adults faced with workplace violence.
The security industry responded, promoting and selling programs that schools and local law enforcement officers adapt with fake blood, menacing masked “shooters” and simulated gunfire. Last year at Short Pump Middle School in Short Pump, Va., school officials staged an unannounced active-shooter drill featuring multiple fire alarms, loud noises and unseen people jiggling the handles of classroom doors.
Thinking it was a real attack, students wept and texted goodbyes. Afterward, parents were furious.
Crane, the founder of ALICE and a former Texas law enforcement officer, said such drills are necessary and could make the difference between life and death. ALICE is an acronym for alert, lockdown, inform, counter and evacuate.
“The training is not designed to scare anyone,” he said in an interview. “I don’t have to make it real to get you to understand how the strategies work.”
In guidance updated in 2017, the National Association of School Psychologists and the National Association of School Resource Officers acknowledged that such drills had the potential to empower staff and save lives. But the groups warned that “without proper caution, they can risk causing harm to participants.”
Psychologists and many educators say frequent, realistic drills contribute to anxiety and depression in children, and they have begun urging school systems to rethink active-shooter training for children and to teach preventive measures, like recognizing and seeking help for troubled classmates.
“The best way to make school safer is to focus on proven policies and programs instead of extreme drills that rob children of their belief that schools are in fact extremely safe places,” Shannon Watts, founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, said in an interview.
Perry of the ChildTrauma Academy said as school shooting drills proliferated during the past two decades, research into their effectiveness failed to keep pace. Children’s brains and coping skills are still developing, he said, and not all children react to stress in the same way, complicating efforts to study how well drills work.
The number of developmentally uninformed, child uninformed and completely stupid ideas is mind-numbing.” Bruce Perry, founder of the ChildTrauma Academy