When kids think a shooter is coming
Lockdowns have become an ordinary feature of the American school day, said journalists Steven Rich and John Woodrow Cox. Even when there’s no violence, children suffer the psychic consequences.
L OCKED BEHIND THEIR green classroom door, MaKenzie Woody and 25 other firstgraders huddled in the darkness. She sat on the vinyl tile floor against a far wall, beneath a taped-up list of phrases the kids were encouraged to say to each other: “I like you,” “You’re a rainbow,” “Are you OK?” In that moment, though, the 6-yearold didn’t say anything at all, because she believed that a man with a gun was stalking the hallways of her school in the nation’s capital, and MaKenzie feared what he might do to her. Three times between September and November, bursts of gunfire near MaKenzie’s public charter elementary school led DC Prep to seal off its Washington campus and sequester its students. During the last one, on Nov. 16, a silver sedan parked just around the corner at 10:42 a.m., then the men inside stepped out and fired more than 40 rounds. As MaKenzie’s class hid upstairs, teachers frantically rushed three dozen preschoolers off the playground and back into the building. The children of DC Prep hid for 20 minutes, until police officers arrived at the crime scene around the corner and began to take note of where the 40-plus bullet casings had scattered. What did not arrive was the caravan of TV trucks and reporters that so often descend on schools when such scenes play out in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. In the hours that followed, students began to unravel. Among the things they said: “Who’s going to shoot me?” “I want to shoot people.” “I want to shoot myself.” “The lockdowns,” as MaKenzie calls them, have changed her, because the little girl with long braids and chocolate-brown eyes remembers what it was like before them, when she always felt safe at her school, and she knows what it’s been like afterward, when that feeling disappeared.
In April, the country will mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High, and that day will arrive in the aftermath of the worst year of school shootings in modern American history. Last spring, The Washington Post launched a database that tracked incidents of gun violence on campuses dating back to 1999, and the carnage in 2018 shattered every record. Most shootings at schools: 25. Most people shot: 94. Most people killed: 33. Most students exposed to gunfire on their campuses: 25,332.
Nonetheless, school shootings remain relatively rare, even after a year of historic carnage on K-12 campuses. What’s not rare are lockdowns, which have become a hallmark of American education and a byproduct of this country’s inability to curb its gun violence epidemic. Lockdowns save lives during real attacks, but even when there is no gunman stalking the hallways, the procedures can inflict immense psychological damage on children convinced that they’re in danger. And the number of kids who have experienced these ordeals is extraordinary.
More than 4.1 million students endured at least one lockdown in the 2017–18 school year alone, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by The Washington Post that included a review of 20,000 news stories and data from school districts in 31 of the country’s largest cities.
The number of students affected eclipsed the populations of Maine, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Vermont combined. But the total figure is likely much higher, because many school districts—including in Detroit and Chicago—do not track lockdowns and hundreds never make the news, particularly when they happen at urban schools attended primarily by children of color.
Still, on a typical day last school year, at least 16 campuses locked down, nine of them because of gun violence or the threat of it. The Post’s final tally of lockdowns exceeded 6,200.
The sudden order to hunker down can overwhelm students, who have wept and soiled themselves, and written farewell messages to family members and wills explaining what should be done with their bicycles and PlayStations. The terror can feel especially acute right after school shootings like the one in Parkland, Fla., when kids are inundated with details from massacres that have taken the lives of students just like them.
In New York City earlier this year, rumors of a firearm on campus sparked panic at a Staten Island high school, where teens desperately texted and called their parents, begging for help, telling them, “I love you.”
In Fremont, Neb., students sobbed as they hid for nearly two hours in a girls’ locker room with the lights turned off after a teenager was spotted with a gun. When armed officers barged in, they ordered the kids to put their hands up.
In Pensacola, Fla., a sixth-grader messaged his grandmother, certain a shooter was in the building after social media threats triggered a lockdown. “Please check me out before I doe,” he wrote her, then corrected his misspelling: “die.”
And then there are the kids like MaKenzie, who have never heard of Parkland or Sandy Hook or Columbine but have heard the sound of gunshots on the streets where they live and play and learn.
She cherishes few things more than school. All of MaKenzie’s classes are her favorite, except for language arts, her “favorite favorite.” The girl can read well beyond her grade level and has nearly memorized the story Monsters Don’t Scuba Dive, said her mother, Gabrielle Woody, who works in an aftercare program at DC Prep.
MaKenzie didn’t stop loving school because of the lockdowns, but she did think about them often. About how upsetting it was that they had interrupted her time to learn new words and different ways to add up numbers. About how scared she’d felt when some of the kids wouldn’t stop making noise and how her teacher