A 7-year-old girl had a lockdown drill because of a potential bomb threat. When she got home, everything seemed fine until she was changing out of her school uniform, and her mom noticed that she had written “Love Mom and Dad” on her arm. When asked, she said it was in case the “bad guy” got to them and killed her, then began to cry. If this is the kind of experience today’s children are going through, school is not safe. Lockdown drills can be triggering for kids with difficult past experiences. Therefore, all school boards should pass regulations to make the drills less intimidating by teaching the A.L.I.C.E. protocol and being child-friendly while still being factual.
On December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, Adam Lanza killed 20 first graders and six school employees before turning a gun on himself. Abbie Clements, an elementary school teacher who survived that shooting, says her students look to her for frequent reassurance during drills. “I feel like I have to say [that it’s a drill] several times because they’re looking at me like, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure?'” she said.
Sandy Hook is not alone in this experience. Although lockdown drills protect students, they can precipitate anxiety, so if kids are unsure of their safety during school, school boards need to step in. The Trace: Investigating Gun Violence in America reports that “According to data from the Department of Education, 98% of U.S public schools drill students on lockdown procedures at least once during the 2019-2020 school year when there were more than 49 million students enrolled in K-12 public schools.” If we start doing this to younger kids, it will establish a sense of fear and make them feel unsafe. The Trace goes on to say that lockdown drills were regularly conducted at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Oxford High School in Michigan, and Rancho Tehama Elementary in California, prior to mass shootings at those schools, yet during the infamous shootings, 43 people were still wounded, and killed.
Kids are negatively impacted both emotionally and mentally by unstandardized school shooting drills in the United States. In 2019, 7-year-old Vanessa Harrison Reed had to think about the possibility of her dying and her parents not knowing that she loved them so she told them by writing on her arm, “so if I got killed and my parents came in they would see it when they found my body,” revealed Yahoo.com. Today.com states that according to her dad, “To know my seven-year-old was put in a position to think that through is absolutely gut-wrenching and it’s killing me inside.” The day after, while waiting for the morning bus, she asked, “Mommy, what if the bad guy comes back today?”
These drills aren’t just scary for young kids. They can also be stressful for older kids. “‘I was genuinely not sure if I would finish the day alive,’ an eighth-grader in New Jersey told The Trace in 2019 after a particularly fraught lockdown drill.” It is unclear whether these drills are worth the stress they can inflict on kids.
Therefore, school boards should make lockdown drills less frequent and less scary by using the A.L.I.C.E. protocol. This would rewrite the explanation of what a lockdown drill is and how to do it in child-friendly language. A.L.I.C.E. is an acronym for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, and evacuate. “Alert” announces the threat. In “Lockdown,” students barricade the rooms if evacuation is not an option. “Inform” communicates as much information about the situation as possible in real-time to 911 or over a PA system. “Counter” is a last resort to confuse a shooter and foil their ability to hit a target. “Evacuate” enables students to move somewhere safe when safe to do so (Navigate 360). Based on the findings of Jonson et al. in “Are Students Scared or Prepared? Psychological Impacts of a Multi-Option Active Assailant Protocol Compared to Other Crisis/Emergency Preparedness Practices,” “When learning about ALICE Training (options-based) through discussion-based classroom protocol, 88% of elementary school students and 94% of junior high/high school students felt safer after the training.” If students feel safe in their school environment, their mental and emotional health won’t suffer. We must use these tools and strategies to help plan and train students in case of an emergency.
In conclusion, to make students feel safe during lockdown drills all school boards should create a set of rules and regulations like the A.L.I.C.E. protocol to help them in the event of a school shooting. If school boards did this, students would be able to have the skill set they need while still feeling safe in a normal school environment. And the biggest worry of children like Vanessa would be a test or who they’re playing with at recess, not what’s going to happen if they get shot.
