Teachers unions censure lockdown drilling
They say resources instead should focus on mental health, threat assessment
The nation’s largest teachers’ unions want to end active shooter drills while students are in class, contending the practice can trigger trauma instead of confidence in a crisis.
Schools should focus on training faculty and staff and pour resources into threat assessment programs, mental health officers, physical security and improving school climate, according to a white paper released Tuesday from the American Federation of Teachers, National Educators Association and Everytown for Gun
“Unfortunately, (lockdown drills) will be a new social norm, because if we don’t train them, they won’t know what to do if the real thing happens.”
Craig Straw, Texas City ISD’s director of security and school safety
Safety Support Fund.
If schools do choose to do lockdown or active shooter drills, the groups wrote, they should omit simulations that mimic actual incidents, give parents advance notice and announce the drills before they begin.
“Unfortunately, (lockdown drills) will be a new social norm, because if we don’t train them, they won’t know what to do if the real thing happens,” said Craig Straw, Texas City ISD’s director of security and school safety.
About 95 percent of schools across the country hold drills to prepare students and teachers for the possibility of a campus shooting, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The call to rethink active shooter drills comes after several lifelike simulations in schools have
drawn national attention and criticism. Trainers shot teachers and staff with plastic pellets at one active shooter training at an elementary school in Indiana last spring, although no students were on campus at the time.
Parents at a suburban Orlando, Fla., school raged against school officials in December 2018 after they warned of a “code red” over a loudspeaker and sent automated texts to teachers that there was an active shooter on campus. The administrators did not say it was a drill, and some students were so afraid that they texted their parents good bye messages, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Some schools, including one in Dayton, Ohio, fired blank rounds of ammunition during lockdowns to familiarize students and staff with the sound of gunshots.
In Texas, school districts are required by state law to hold several types of emergency drills a year, including fire evacuations, shelters-in-place for hazmat scenarios, shelters-in-place for severe weather and lockdowns. The Texas Education Agency will release rules this summer about the number of each type of drills schools must do, but it currently recommends schools hold at least two simulated lockdowns each school year. The trainings were required after a mass shooting at Santa Fe High School in Galveston County left 10 dead and 13 wounded on May 18, 2018. However, each district differs in how it conducts the exercises.
Perhaps no districts in the state have changed how they approach training and preparing for potential shootings more than those located near Santa Fe ISD. Clear Creek ISD, for example, created a local mandate to conduct multiple drills nearly one year before that approach was enshrined in state law. There, school administrators warn parents, teachers and students of the exact date and time of a drill. They use a specialized curriculum about several types of drills for students from kindergarten through 12th grade, and do not use any sound effects or roleplaying when conducting the drills.
Clear Creek ISD Superintendent Greg Smith likened it to the bomb drills of the 1960s, in which students would hide under their desks in the event of a Soviet missile attack, and routine fire drills that have occurred for decades.
“We’ve tried to do it in systematic way, and we’ve created some good muscle memory for people to respond to various threats out there,” Smith said.
That muscle memory came into play in late 2018, when one of the district’s elementary schools had to enact what is known as a lockout as police pursued a felony suspect near the campus. Brian Palazzi, the district’s director of safe schools, said campus administrators brought all the kids inside, locked all the exterior doors and did not allow anyone to enter or leave until the lockout was lifted.
Despite the chaos outside, it was calm inside the school, he said.
“The teachers got the kids off the playground and things were going on as normal,” Palazzi said. “The kids weren’t scared because they had done it before.”
Other Houston-area districts have chosen more realistic simulations.
School officials in Texas City ISD, also located near Santa Fe, give parents about a week’s notice before a drill but never disclose the date and time beforehand. The district uses an app that flashes warnings across all computers inside a school and on the cellphone screens of every teacher and employee describing the threat or type of emergency situation. Teachers can mark the status of each of their students, indicating whether they are all accounted for and if any are missing or injured. Those reports feed back to a central database, which allows law enforcement and district officials to pinpoint a threat and know where and how to treat students and staff.
During lockdown drills, police officials bang on classroom doors to see if students make noise in response, TCISD’s Straw said. Only law enforcement officers are allowed to open classroom doors in those scenarios, even if a drill is finished
The district does not use actors pretending to be shooters roaming halls, nor does it try to simulate the sound of gun fire. Straw said the district uses the same drill curriculum used by Clear Creek ISD and spends about an hour and a half debriefing with school staff following each drill.
“For teachers who say this causes stress, we’ve been doing fire drills for years. Students are used to hearing the sound of the drill and they don’t panic,” Straw said.