Abstract
About 95% of schools nationwide hold lockdown drills for students and staff in response to security concerns, including an active shooter. Jaclyn Schildkraut, the interim executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, talks about the importance of performing lockdown drills in a trauma-informed way. Through her work and research with the Syracuse City School District, she recommends best practices and stresses the importance of training for school staff.
Keywords
Jaclyn Schildkraut graduated from high school a year before the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Her mother had always told her that she remembered where she was when she heard about John F. Kennedy’s assassination and how that was a defining moment in her life. “For me, that [defining] moment was Columbine,” she says. “I remember being so fascinated because I never thought my peers could do anything like that.”
The mass shooting at Virginia Tech eight years later spurred her to go back to school and continue her education to “understand this issue more in hopes of preventing it,” she says. A former resident of the Parkland, Florida, area, she saw her work become even more personal and urgent after the 2018 mass school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Her research focuses on crime statistics, media representations, security and prevention, and legislative responses to U.S. mass shootings. She is the interim executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, housed within New York’s Rockefeller Institute of Government, and associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego. She is the author of numerous papers and books on mass shootings, including Columbine, 20 Years Later and Beyond: Lessons from Tragedy with Glenn W. Muschert.
Schildkraut has published a new book with co-author Amanda B. Nickerson: Lockdown Drills: Connecting Research and Best Practices for School Administrators, Teachers, and Parents. The book is based on their research and work with New York’s Syracuse City School District.
Schildkraut spoke with Phi Delta Kappan about the correct way to hold lockdown drills, the need for national guidance on school emergency responses, and the legacy of Columbine.
What have we learned about school security since Columbine?
Columbine was very different from a lot of other mass shootings. At the time, police practices were very different. It was viewed as a SWAT [special weapons and tactics] problem rather than a patrol officer problem. On the day of the shooting, officers did what they were trained to do. They created a perimeter and waited for the SWAT team. That meant that the perpetrators had the run of the school for about 50 minutes. While this was happening, members of the national media were up in Boulder, about 40 minutes away, covering the JonBenét Ramsey murder trial. They were able to get in their cars and go to Littleton. The scene was active for so long that it was still going on by time they showed up. That’s how we saw the iconic images that came out of the shooting.
Because it was broadcast on television, Columbine couldn’t be left to the imagination. It wasn’t something that we heard about after the fact. We saw law enforcement practices significantly change because of Columbine. Instead of waiting around for SWAT, if you’re the first officers on the scene, you go in and try to stop the killing so that you can stop the dying. We know that lockdown drills were not heard of at that time, but now they’re used in 95% of schools nationwide. We’ve seen that the school security products market has expanded. Double vestibule entries, visitor management systems, and security cameras weren’t common before. Also, it caused us as a nation to confront how we talked about mass violence and how we might be contributing to the problem with the way we glamorize and romanticize these acts for our own consumption.
Can you tell us the results of your research on lockdown drills?
My colleague Amanda Nickerson and I have been working together for four years now on this project. I’ve been working in New York state’s fifth largest school district, Syracuse City School District, since right after the Parkland, Florida, mass school shooting. We are trying to understand the effects of lockdown drills and the benefits. We typically only hear about the drills that are being done wrong. We don’t have conversations about how they can be done in a meaningful way. That’s the focus of our research.
We see a conflation between lockdown drills and active shooter drills. Active shooter drills usually refer to options-based protocols like “run, hide, fight,” or the ALICE [alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate] Protocol, which are widely used. These protocols have challenges. While “run, hide, fight” is beneficial in certain scenarios, it’s usually not the best plan for schools. Little kids remember things in the order that you tell them, and you don’t want them running unless that’s their only option. Plus, these options-based protocols only can be used in an active shooter situation. They weren’t really designed for anything outside of an active attacker trying to harm you. Lockdowns can be used for any danger that’s inside of the building. It certainly could be an active shooter. It could also be a bear. I grew up in South Florida, so it could be an alligator. The main principles of a lockdown are getting the door locked, turning the lights off, getting out of sight, and maintaining silence so that you’re not calling any attention to your room.
The first step, the door lock, is the most critical. We know from school shootings that the number-one life-saving device in an active shooter event in a school is a door lock. We have only seen four cases, including Uvalde, Texas, where anybody has been killed behind a locked door – but it isn’t because the door locks failed. The shooters are individuals who, with rare exceptions, don’t usually have more than a couple of minutes. They’re looking for easy targets, not people they have to work for. You’re creating distance in terms of being away from them, but you’re also creating a time barrier because they would have to defeat the lock to get into the room to harm you unless they were already in the room when it started.
We can use lockdowns for other situations. For example, in Syracuse, we talked to students about how what we are learning can be useful in other settings. I’ve got students who are not likely to have a Parkland event, but they’re exposed to community gun violence daily. We talk to them about how you keep the same principles of “locks, lights, out of sight” for your home or another space to keep you and your family safe.
What are some best practices for lockdown drills?
To do lockdown drills right, they must be done in a trauma-informed way. There is amazing guidance from groups like the National Association of School Psychologists, the National Association of School Resource Officers, and Safe and Sound Schools. The guidance talks about steps to keep the temperature and anxiety down, such as making sure you always call it a drill. We never want students to think that it’s real when it’s actually practice. We don’t need to use any sensorial techniques. When we go into school, it’s a very calm experience. We don’t have people dressed as shooters. We’re not firing off simulated gunfire, and there are no vials filled with fake blood. Our goal is to practice our steps. Whether it’s teachers or staff, it’s important for the people with the kids to model calm behavior. If you’re calm, the kids are calm. They look to adults as their protectors, so when you escalate, they go with you because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do.
Make sure to debrief at the end. Take some time to talk about what happened and ask questions. How could you do better? What do you want to work on? Create a space where students feel that they can talk. One of the biggest hesitancies I’ve seen is adults unwilling to have conversations with kids. Most adults know the world before Columbine when lockdown drills were not normal. But children don’t know any different. Creating spaces to answer their questions is really important.
Beyond those best practices, our work highlights the importance of incorporating training. Schools are being told by their state that they have to do x number of drills. New York schools are required to do four drills every year. If you just go through the motions, you’re not getting anything out of it. You don’t know what your vulnerabilities are. You don’t know what you need to work on. You’re telling students they don’t need to take this seriously. In Syracuse, we offered training. We said, “Here’s what you need to do. Here’s why we do each of these steps. Here’s how we’re going to put this all together when we practice.” We’ve helped create a culture of preparedness where everybody takes the drills very seriously. Not that they’re scared, but they take it seriously.
Why is it important to have federal standards or guidance for lockdown drills?
The challenge is that there’s so much variability, which means that we don’t know how the drills are being done. I am constantly in the media defending the great work that we’re doing because they assume our drills are the same as the drill that happened in Indiana where teachers were shot with pellet guns.
Because of stories like that, everybody assumes that all lockdown drills are bad. If we are concerned as a nation about the effects of lockdown drills or active shooter drills, then we need to follow the evidence. We have shown in numerous ways that when you do drills in a trauma-informed manner and when you embed those best practices into the work that you’re doing, you can have positive outcomes for students.
I come from a community [Parkland] that was never supposed to have a mass shooting. We were one of the safest communities in America until we weren’t. The teachers had received very minimal training, and the students had none. I’m not going to be a Monday morning quarterback by saying the outcome would have been different. We will never know that. But it’s possible that it could have been different. Unless or until our country actually does something about mass shootings and works to prevent them more than just reacting to them, we’re going to have to do lockdown drills. If we’re going to do them, it’s incredibly important to make sure that we’re doing them right.
So many different agencies and jurisdictions are going to show up on that very worst day. The more we can standardize what happens in school during these incidents, the easier it will make their jobs because they’ll know what to expect.
There are many benefits of standardizing or at least having national guidance on how we do drills appropriately. How can we make sure that we’re doing them in the right way? How do we make sure that we hold schools accountable and do it in a way that doesn’t just get treated like a tick-box exercise? If we’re really that concerned about the effects of lockdown drills, then we should put out more evidence-based guidance. The U.S. Department of Education is the agency that should release that guidance. There’s a difference between offering guidance and telling states what they have to do. Right now, we’re getting neither of those.