One in 5 students have experienced a school lockdown in response to an actual threat of nearby violence by the time they’re in middle school, with students in higher-income districts less likely to experience lockdowns than those in poorer neighborhoods, according to a new study.
The study, published online this month in Educational Researcher, the flagship journal of the American Educational Research Association, found that about 8% of children in a larger adolescent cognitive development project reported experiencing a school lockdown in the past year, defined as firearms activity or other violence at or in the vicinity of the school that prompts security measures such as sealing entrances and exits and restricting movement around the building.
Just over 12% experienced lockdowns prior to the past year, while nearly 80 percent reported never having gone through a lockdown.
“Lockdowns can be traumatic events that occur in students’ lives, and they affect their education, such as taking away their instructional time,” Keith L. Hullenaar, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington, said in an interview.
“What our paper tries to show, I think pretty convincingly, is that students who live and also receive their education in places with already a pretty low amount of socioeconomic investment are experiencing these kind of traumatic events even more” than those in other neighborhoods, said Hullenaar, the lead author.
A call for closer tracking of school lockdowns
The study, co-authored by Benjamin W. Fisher of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Frederick P. Rivara, also of the University of Washington, was based on a sample of just over 10,000 participants, mostly around ages 12 or 13, in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a long-term study of children’s brain development supported by the National Institutes of Health. The study was not as nationally representative as a random survey might be, and rural areas were underrepresented, the authors report.
The study defined lockdowns as events initiated by a credible threat of violence inside or near a school. Under a lockdown, many schools lock doors, darken rooms, and call for silence. Meanwhile, “lockouts,” in which the threat may be outside, result in securing a perimeter but instruction inside locked school doors may continue. The study asked only about lockdowns.
The study did not cover school violence drills, which can range from discussions to full-scale simulations involving simulated gunfire and role-played confrontations. Drills have been the subject of separate research, including a National Academy of Sciences report last year that found some practices were causing mental, emotional, and behavioral health harms.
“The concerns about drills are that they can be traumatic for the kids, depending on how intense they are,” said Hullenaar, who has also done research on drills.
But there has been relatively scant research on actual school lockdowns. The study calls for a more standardized system for tracking lockdown events, such as by adding questions to federal surveys such as the School Survey on Crime and Safety or the Civil Rights Data Collection.
“I just don’t know why we’re not tracking lockdowns,” Hullenaar said. “It seems to be this really important thing that a lot of people are concerned about. Wouldn’t it be great to know how many schools in the United States had a lockdown related to a violent event in the past year?”
Students aren’t sharing the lockdown burden equally
On socioeconomic differences in lockdowns, the study says, “Past-year school lockdown exposure was more common among children living in census tracts with lower levels of historical and contemporary opportunity and attending school districts with lower SES,” or socioeconomic status.
And the authors offer a pretty straightforward explanation for the socioeconomic differences in results that do show up in the past-year data.
“The disproportionate lockdown exposure among students from economically and socially disadvantaged communities at least reflects the easy access to firearms in the United States as well as the higher risk of firearm violence experienced by youth from historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups living in areas that have suffered systemic resource disinvestment for decades,” the study says.
Hullenaar said the key recommendation for school administrators is that after a lockdown event, they do more to identify students who may have been most affected.
“Administrators need a way to identify the kids who may have had a more intense experience with the lockdown and then connect them with the social-emotional support that they may need to recover from it,” he said.
Sonali Rajan, a professor of health promotion and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, who researches firearm violence, including in schools, said the lockdown study was “a really important contribution to the school safety literature.”
“This study does an important job of reminding us that the burden of experiencing these events is not shared equally across students,” Rajan said via email. “The findings also reinforce … that schools do not exist in isolation from the communities surrounding them. We simply cannot expect schools to solve the problem of violence, particularly when the underlying conditions contributing to violence are systemic.”
The research also “underscores the need to invest not only in how schools respond to threats, but also in preventing those threats from occurring in the first place,” Rajan said.
