The Case Against Lockdown Drills

It was 6 p.m., about a month into my son’s kindergarten year, when an email popped up telling me there’d be a lockdown drill at school the next day. I responded in a fugue state, replying to say I wanted my son to skip the drill and could they “please let me know what you need from me, thanks so much!!”

Yes, I quickly entered a panic spiral, worrying I sounded like an overreacting, overly precious mom, but still, my gut feelings were firm. It all just felt like one too many Jenga blocks of cognitive dissonance. I could accept that school lunch is chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. I could accept that our public school building’s pipes probably have lead in them, so we should bring a water bottle. But having my kid learn how to hide from an active shooter in the back of a closet when hasn’t even mastered the alphabet yet? This was, apparently, where I drew the line.

The morning of the drill, when I came to pick up my kid — a bit sheepish, but resolved — I nearly cried with relief when both his teacher and the school librarian let me know they were glad he’d be skipping the drill. (A recent poll of U.S. teachers found that his teachers were far from alone in their skepticism of lockdown drills.) When it was time for the school to do “locks, lights, out of sight,” that day, it was my extreme privilege to be down the block, sitting with my kid in a cozy cafe, chatting over cake pops.

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.

“As a parent and a pediatrician, I have no idea the psychological impact of robbing children at these crucial developmental stages of a sense of physical and psychological safety in this space where they should be made to feel incredibly safe.”

“Seriously?” I asked Dr. Annie Andrews, a pediatrician and a senior adviser to Everytown for Gun Safety. “Seriously. There is essentially no evidence to support that they do anything to protect our children. If there is an active-shooter situation, having done the drills does nothing to protect the students in the school at the time.” Worse, she added, because school shooters tend to be current or former students, there is data to show that these drills actually train shooters to know exactly how to anticipate the lockdown and plan accordingly.

What limited data there is on lockdown drills shows that while they may increase feelings of “preparedness” in students and staff (whether that translates to actual preparedness is questionable, though) lockdown drills can decrease students’ feelings of safety at school. This loss, Andrews points out, may have a particularly profound impact on students for whom school is their only safe place.

While some research has demonstrated that there are short-term negative consequences of subjecting children to “rehearsing their own deaths in their classroom,” as Andrews puts it — such as anxiety, poor school performance, depression, and stress — almost nothing is known about potential long-term negative consequences of lockdowns and shooter drills. “As a parent and a pediatrician, I have no idea the psychological impact of robbing children at these crucial developmental stages of a sense of physical and psychological safety in this space where they should be made to feel incredibly safe.”

Not only are lockdown drills and lockdowns themselves potentially traumatizing a generation of kids for no proven benefit, locking down may be the absolute worst thing to do in the event of a mass shooting at a school. Some experts believe it would be much better for kids to scatter and run from the school, as far and fast as possible. “A school is the only place in our society where we tell people not to get away from imminent danger,” says David Riedman, a professor at Idaho State University whose K-12 school shooting database helped me understand what gun violence in American schools really looks like on the daily. (And it does happen daily, or nearly daily.) Riedman’s database — which is unparalleled and has been used by nearly every major media outlet, as well as by the FBI — also helped me see that guns in schools are a much bigger, more nagging, more insidious problem than the very rare (albeit terrifying) mass school shootings that most of us hear about and that most of us think of when we imagine the “why” behind lockdown drills.

“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.”

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.

Eventually, I turned my attention back home. I emailed our local school district itself to find out more about the decision-making that happened at a district level around lockdown drills and what room there was for parent involvement. Over Zoom, the administrator in charge of school safety for our district committed entirely, confusingly, to the idea that my entire line of thinking was off-base. When I’d bring up the fact that there are evidence-based things we could be doing to prevent gun violence in schools — like parent education about safe storage — he’d interrupt me. Lockdown drills, he’d say, aren’t necessarily about guns and school shootings. They’re practicing for “any threat.”

I asked him to name a threat that a lockdown drill prepares the kids for that wasn’t a school shooting, and after a pregnant pause, he mustered an example that would have been funny if it weren’t quite so bizarre: a wild animal, he said. If a coyote wandered into the school, he postulated, a lockdown might be necessary. Where we live in the Pacific Northwest, it’s highly unlikely but not outside of the realm of possibility, I’ll grant him. But I’m not sure why the kids would need to be hiding behind locked doors with the lights out if a coyote somehow walked into the school building. Having reached my disappointment quota for the day, I got off the Zoom call as quickly as I politely could.

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.”

Recently, some school districts have begun to reassess lockdown drills as a practice. In Philadelphia schools, students are taught evacuation procedures as an alternative option to locking down. “A school is the only place in our society where we tell people not to run away from imminent danger,” echoes Riedman, who has a background in emergency management as well as homeland security. Thankfully, as Riedman’s data shows, most school shootings are not mass shootings. Rather, they’re an interpersonal conflict — often but not always involving students — that go too far and end in someone firing a gun on a school campus. In the context of these far more frequent school shootings, lockdowns make no sense. They do not protect kids from guns because they don’t stop guns from coming to school. When a school locks down because of a school shooting like this, entire student bodies and their families are traumatized as the kids sit in the dark, waiting for an “all clear.”

When we opt out of the lockdown drill, we undermine a practice that is fear-based instead of evidence-based, a symptom that perpetuates the disease.

My son is in first grade now, and my commitment to offering him the option of skipping lockdown drills every time one is announced has been nothing but bolstered, and it has become philosophical as much as practical. I have come to see opting out as a form of resistance. When we opt out of the lockdown drill, we undermine a practice that is fear-based instead of evidence-based, a symptom that perpetuates the disease.

I was pleasantly surprised when Riedman forwarded me President Joe Biden’s September executive order, which calls for the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Department of Homeland Security to work together to study how shooter drills cause trauma to students and educators, and create better evidence-based drills to limit those effects.

Lockdown drills stoke fear in our children as they soothe parents, school districts, and government officials into complacency, when the moment demands unity, clarity, activism, and bravery. We must face our school shooting problem head on — we must face our fears, and more than that, we must believe in a better reality. Rejecting lockdowns and lockdown drills as they are implemented today is about believing that school shootings are preventable. Every expert I spoke to believes passionately that we can turn the tide if we focus on the practices that have been proven to reduce gun violence in schools.

“We’re parents of the lockdown generation, but it doesn’t have to stay this way. My grandchildren don’t have to grow up in these same circumstances,” Andrews says. “Sometimes that we get a little bit complacent, like, ‘Oh, this is just how America is; this is how it’s been.’ That is not true. This has all evolved in a relatively short time period. There are many levers of change that we can use to rewrite this, to make sure that our grandchildren do not experience the same thing that our children are experiencing.”

Skipping the drills isn’t about ignoring our country’s gun violence problem or school shooting problem. Lockdown drills were never good enough for our kids; they have always been a placebo. I don’t want the placebo; I want the real deal: stricter gun control, parental education on safe storage, better mental health resources in our area, and open conversation with fellow parents about guns in the home.

Giving my kids the option to opt out of lockdown drills is deeply personal. Really, it’s a prayer; may we keep the melody of our hearts tuned to hope, not fear. May that hope stoke the fires that keep complacency at bay, so we continue to fight for a culture that all our children deserve.

Miranda Rake is a writer, editor and co-host of The Mother of It All, a podcast exploring the culture of modern motherhood with curiosity and compassion.