After that, I became obsessed with the question of lockdown drills. What, exactly, do they entail and who decides when they happen? Is there a downside to skipping the drills? Is there a proven benefit to doing them? And finally, how did we get here, where lockdown drills — also sometimes called “active-shooter drills,” though neither has been federally defined — are mandated in at least 40 states? The more studies I read and the more experts I spoke to, the more nonsense I found.
I learned that lockdown drills are not an evidence-based practice. I learned it again and again, because every time I’d read it, I’d feel so dumbfounded that I’d have to go read it again somewhere else just to be sure.
Why, Riedman asks, in the case of school shootings do we tell kids to stay put? To stay exactly where school shooters — who are usually familiar with their school’s lockdown procedure — know they would be? The Department of Justice report of the Uvalde school shooting — a 600-page document — describes kids shot through the very walls they’d been taught would protect them.
Mass shootings in schools — like Uvalde, Sandy Hook, Columbine, Parkland — are very, very rare, Riedman assures me repeatedly. Obviously, they are a parent’s worst nightmare, but it’s also very, very unlikely that something like that will happen at your kid’s school. In light of this, does it make sense that 95% of American schools do lockdown drills every year, sometimes multiple times a year?
Not at all, Riedman says. “You’re making every single kid fear something that’ll probably never happen, and for the 1 in a million who might feel inclined towards violence, you’re giving them a template for exactly what to do.”
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