Last Thursday, armed men stalked the hallways of Florida’s Jewett Middle Academy and burst into classrooms where students huddled in the dark, on lockdown. These men with guns weren’t would-be assassins. They were police officers.
One carried a loaded handgun. Another, an unloaded AR-15 assault rifle. Both were pointed at the ground, but when students and teachers saw the officers come through their classroom doors, they panicked. One girl texted her mother, and word spread among parents. Some rushed to the school, thinking a Columbine-type incident was taking place. But there was no shooter. It was only a drill coordinated by the local police department and the school administration, who failed to alert teachers, staff, parents, and students that the drill would be taking place. Because of that, what should have been a practice felt like the real deal.
“We actually thought someone was going to come in there and kill us,” said one seventh grader.
These drills have become common-place in schools around the country, but I fear they’re doing more harm than good. In an essay ominously entitled “Rehearsing for Death,” Launa Hall, a teacher in Arlington, Virginia, recounts another lockdown drill that went awry after a miscommunication among school administration kept her pre-k class hidden in a closet for thirteen minutes. Though teachers had been told a drill was going to happen, the vice principal inadvertently left the word “drill” out of the lockdown announcement. As what should have been a three to four minute activity stretched longer, Hall couldn’t help but fear that something had actually gone wrong. While her four- and five-year-old students didn’t know exactly why they were sitting silently on their coat closet floor, Hall, who now teaches third grade, told the Huffington Post that older kids need more assurance. “They have enough world knowledge to look at me and say, ‘We’re just pretending, right?’”
It is impossible to pretend that we are under attack, and not experience real emotions of fear. That’s why it’s called a drill, right? It’s a military training exercise, meant to dull us to the painful and horrible realities of war. But I don’t believe such exercises belong in American schools.
We send our children to school so that they can make friends, work with others, and figure out how to behave in a social setting. We send our children to school so that they can learn how to read, write, compute, and understand history and science. We should not be sending our kids to school to practice what to do when under attack, and by no means should police officers be needlessly brandishing weapons in our children’s classrooms.
I was fortunate to grow up in the post-Cold War era. Aside from a tornado drill, in which we lined the hallways of our middle school with our head between our knees, I didn’t practice what to do in case the Soviet Union rained nuclear death from the sky. Those drills inspired fear in people like my parents, who were children of the sixties, that death could come at any time. Similarly, I think that today’s drills are making kids and teachers feel less rather than more safe.
The fact is, schools remain very safe places for our children. According to The Washington Post, more mass shootings occur in restaurants than schools, and children are 100 times more likely to be murdered outside of school than on school property. Our current fascination with school shootings seems to stem from two places: the 24-hour news cycle, which replays images of these tragedies over and over again, and the proliferation of military-style assault rifles designed to kill many people in a short amount of time, making it possible for one shooter to end a large number of lives in just a few minutes.
Active shooter drills create a narrative for children in which such violence is just something that happens, it’s a part of life. Instead of rehearsing for attack, we should be focusing more time on educating our children how to be compassionate, kind citizens. Instead of inviting cops to strap on their SWAT gear and enter our schools to test that the classroom doors are locked and the kids quietly stashed away in the closets, we should be passing tougher laws to restrict the proliferation of weapons designed purely for the murder of fellow human beings.
I don’t believe that these are that far-fetched positions to hold. Last night it was announced that the principal responsible for coordinating the Jewett active shooter drill was suspended for her “lack of good judgement,” and the school superintendent changed the rules for such drills to prevent law enforcement from packing guns, loaded or unloaded. These drills are reactions to America’s violent gun culture. It’s time we stop reacting and do something concrete about this culture’s underlying cause: the availability of the weapons themselves.
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