With school shootings continuing to be an unfortunate regular event, schools are increasingly working to ensure their students know how to react to best protect themselves by conducting mandatory active shooter drills. Intended to help students remain calm and quiet under these stressful situations, questions have arisen as to the actual benefits of these drills – do they ensure preparedness, or do they just introduce a new cause of stress into young children not fully capable of processing these threats, asks The Atlantic.
While students have previously had to participate in similar drills, with Cold War drills still being a common memory, and many areas holding training for natural disasters, active shooter drills represent a shift, changing the threat from the impersonal force of nature to the personal, with the perceived potential threat being a fellow student or friend.
Of the effectiveness, Meredith Corley, a teacher who taught math in Colorado after Columbine, told The Atlantic, “it’s good to do emergency drills, but active shooters are not a drill anyone should have to do. It re-traumatizes kids who have experienced violence. Getting the kids settled back into the work of learning after lockdown drills is a nightmare. That mind-set has no place in a learning environment.”
Observes Ryan Marino, an emergency-medicine physician at the University of Pittsburgh on participating in these drills as a child, “having to practice and prepare for a peer coming to my school and shooting at me and my friends was something that really changed the overall atmosphere. Looking back, it was a major shift in how the world felt.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/effects-of-active-shooter/554150/
