Schools need more support to design active shooter drills that prepare students for emergencies without unnecessarily traumatizing them, President Joe Biden said as he signed an executive order calling for new federal guidance on the issue.
Nearly every school in the country regularly conducts lockdown or active shooter drills with students, Biden noted as he signed the Sept. 26 order at the White House, but those efforts can cause unnecessary anxiety for students, who frequently see news reports about shootings.
“You all understand, many of you in here, the psychological impact that has on a child,” Biden told a room full of shooting survivors, advocates for stricter gun laws, and parents whose children died in school shootings. “We just have to do better, and we can do better.”
Biden’s order, which also includes violence-prevention measures, give the federal departments of Education, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services until mid January to create new guidance for schools and higher education institutions on “how to create, implement, and evaluate evidence-informed, effective, and age- and developmentally appropriate school-based drills” that consider the needs of students with disabilities and don’t provoke unnecessary fear.
The order comes after complaints from some educators and safety consultants that over-realistic drills—some involving the firing of blanks in school hallways and the use of fake blood—are not grounded in research and do not effectively prepare students to respond to a range of emergencies, including more common events like precautionary lockdowns.
States restrict simulation tactics in school drills
States have enacted new restrictions on school-based drills in recent years, calling sensational tactics unnecessary and harmful. Most recently, a resolution approved by the New York State Board of Regents in April directs schools to ensure that “drills and training do not include props, actors, simulations, or other tactics intended to mimic a school shooting, incident of violence, or other emergency.”
Laws in New Jersey and Washington state include similar restrictions.
“You can prepare your kids for a house fire by telling them where to meet and how to climb out of their windows,” Washington state Rep. Amy Walen, a Democrat, said in 2022 before voting to limit simulation drills that aren’t developmentally appropriate. “But you don’t have to burn the house down to show them how to escape a house fire safely.”
Ninety-six percent of public schools reported conducting lockdown drills in the 2021-22 school year, the most recent federal data show. Administrators and policymakers often use the terms “lockdown” and “active shooter” interchangeably in discussions of drills.
Schools have wide variation in their drill practices, differing on whether they alert parents beforehand, and whether they keep trainings more general or focus on specific events, like shootings. Some states also require schools to train students controversial techniques, like how to “counter” attackers by distracting them or pelting them with classroom objects like books.
Most researchers support the use of simple lockdown drills, which focus on teaching students to lock classroom doors, shut off lights, stand out of view from any windows, and stay silent.
Those techniques could be used to respond to everything from a rare mass shooting to a wild animal lose on campus, Jaclyn Schildkraut, the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, told Education Week in 2022.
“The goals of a drill are to build muscle memory so that if there is ever an emergency—whatever the situation is—if there is any kind of impairment from stress or whatever, your body will take over and do what it’s supposed to do,” she said. “The theatrics and everything else is simply not needed to achieve that muscle memory.”
The National Association of School Psychologists and the National Association of School Resource Officers issued joint guidance on drills in 2022 that supported lockdown procedures and emphasized that simulations should be used to train adults, like law enforcement officers, not students.
Biden’s order also created a new task force on emerging firearms threats, like “ghost guns,” which include plastic firearms created with 3D printers that are impossible to trace or screen with traditional metal detectors. Ghost guns have been confiscated in schools, and a student used one to shoot a classmate in a school restroom in Rockville, Md., in 2022.
