Critique Of Traumatic Lockdown Drills Amidst Tragedies Like Uvalde School Sh00ting

My daughter’s fourth-grade class watched a video last year with tips on what to do during a school sh00ting. Throughout the video, kids text their parents affectionately, “I love you.”

The school my daughter attends does not allow children to have cell phones. The lesson she took away from this was that she couldn’t say goodbye to me or her mother if a shooter ever entered her school.

Recently, her fifth-grade class went through a lockdown drill without being informed that they were practicing for something real. She clutched her friend’s hand tightly as she huddled close to her, reciting Psalm 23 in a low voice.

She’s just ten years old, yet when she returned home that day, she declared it her “last day on Earth.”

Critique Of Traumatic Lockdown Drills Amidst Tragedies Like Uvalde School Shooting

Students nationwide are being subjected to such psychological agony at the hands of adults who claim they are acting in self-defense. Not all pupils are subjected to such casual traumatization, but nearly all must be mentally prepared for a lockdown.

National Center for Education Statistics data shows that by the 2015-2016 school year, “about 95 percent of schools had drilled students on a lockdown procedure.”

On Tuesday, I spoke with Franci Crepeau-Hobson, the School Safety and Crisis Committee chair for the National Association of School Psychologists.

She told me that despite the good intentions of school administrators, “a lot of it is sadly driven by, you know, a fear of litigation and lawsuits.” If we don’t do this and anything terrible happens, we must answer for it.

The phone call made to parents of students at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a year ago is one that no one hopes to receive.

Also, the phone call made to parents at Oxford High School in Michigan, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, and countless other schools whose names have been forgotten.

Similarly, no district or school administrator wants to be blamed for failing to protect students and staff from a crazed sh00ter.

But school authorities’ good intentions — their need to appear to be doing something in reaction to such tragedies — do not justify subjecting pupils to the anxiety of thinking someone might soon break into their classroom and k!ll them.

“Any drill, it should be really clear that this is a drill,” Crepeau-Hobson stated. “Drills are intended to build muscle memory: so I know what to do when there is a real emergency. And if you’ve got a kid who thinks they’re gonna die, that’s not helpful. They’re not going to remember what to do.”

You can get more information by reading the whole post that we’ve provided down here-

Following last year’s sh00ting in Uvalde, Texas, in which an 18-year-old with an AR-15-style weapon ki!!ed 19 fourth graders and two teachers, state politicians around the country have adopted various and sometimes contradictory stances on lockdown drills.

An Alabama lawmaker has proposed legislating a response to the tragedy in Uvalde, suggesting that all school districts “require the participation of school resource officers and law enforcement agencies in regularly scheduled lockdown drills; and to designate the days on which lockdown drills are conducted as school safety and awareness days.”

Two New York state legislators have recommended cutting the current annual average of four lockdown exercises down to just one and providing adequate notice to parents so they can opt their children out of participation in the drills if they so choose.

If you believe the “justification” for the law, “Parents report stories of their children texting them goodbye messages or writing out their wills, imagining the drills are real, or having nightmares for weeks afterward. One study on the aftereffects of the drills shows that they led to a 39% spike in depression, a 42% increase in stress and anxiety, and a 23% increase in overall physiological health problems.”

Statistics on emotional distress were published in a December 2021 issue of the Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

A social worker in Freeport, Maine, whose children go to school there recently testified in favor of legislation allowing parents to opt out of lockdown drills because she was told she couldn’t prevent her 6- and 7-year-old children from participating.

The purpose of each drill may vary. Many urge students to remain silent and choose the most secure position possible. There are also att@cks simulated, complete with phony g*nfire and staged bl00d, which may or may not be known in advance to be drilled.

A charity organization named Sandy Hook Promise was founded after the tragic 2012 sh00ting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

In January of that year, they spoke against simulations, labeling them a “dangerous new trend that is impacting our students’ safety and their mental health.”

Legislators in Minnesota yesterday passed a bill that will virtually outlaw active sh00ter simulations at the state’s public schools.

Continue reading the most recent news of other schools we are covered on this site daily:

The law mandates that parents be notified at least 24 hours before any lockdown exercise and that teachers have a discussion with children afterward that allows them time and space to relax.

It doesn’t appear that my daughter’s school was doing a simulation, as another class of fifth graders was informed that the previous lockdown drill was just that: a drill.

The students in her class appear to have been left in needless fear due to a communication failure (in my opinion, an unacceptable one). I was confident that lockdown drills were the problem before I contacted the school psychologist’s organization.

To the degree that there are issues, I now believe it is due to a lack of communication and an inability to carry it out properly.

“It’s incredibly frustrating to those of us who work in the area of school safety,” Crepeau-Hobson says, “because these things that, for example, your child’s school is doing run counter to best practices and aren’t helpful and don’t keep kids safer.”

She argued that the purpose of drills is to make participants more prepared for real-life situations rather than more anxious and uneasy.

When I start to worry about our darling girl, I tell myself that the odds of someone sh00ting her to de@th at school are, according to reports, roughly 10 million to 1. That’s still way too expensive.

However, the school officials who are nominally protecting her may end up causing more emotional trauma than the school sh00ter ever could.

Leave a comment