When the Snowflake-Taylor police division within the excessive desert of Arizona carried out an lively shooter drill at Snowflake Excessive Faculty in October 2024, college students didn’t take it critically, says police chief Bobby Martin. They had been wandering round campus, laughing, having conversations, and never locking doorways.
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So firstly of this 12 months, the police division determined to make issues extra lifelike: they’d maintain a drill with out advance discover, and maybe college students would concentrate. However when the announcement went over the PA system that there was an lively shooter on campus—and that this was not a drill—college students panicked. One scholar texted her mom that there was an lively shooter and that she liked her, including “we’d die.” The PA recording, made by a principal who had not been on the faculty for some time, triggered extra confusion and panic than anticipated, Martin says.
“That was not how we had been intending it to go by any means,” he says. “However the response after that was that we should always again off and never do it in any respect, however that’s not an answer, as a result of if something occurs, it is advisable to be ready.”
Faculty districts and regulation enforcement throughout the nation have been grappling with this situation as faculty shootings proceed unabated. There have been 208 faculty shootings to this point in 2025, after 336 in all of 2024, in response to the Ok-12 Faculty Taking pictures Database and now, greater than 95% of public faculties carry out lockdown drills yearly.
However as Snowflake discovered, these drills will be traumatic to college students, particularly if they’re carried out within the improper manner. One 2020 research analyzed conversations over Twitter (now generally known as X) and Reddit earlier than and after lively shooter drills occurred, and located that the drills had been related to a rise in melancholy, stress, and nervousness amongst kids and their dad and mom, and that considerations about dying elevated by 22%. Phrases like “blood,” and “ache” grew to become extra constant in social media posts within the 90 days after a faculty drill, the research discovered.
Nonetheless, most specialists agree that practising for lively shooter occasions is useful, so taking out drills completely is normally not an possibility. Colleges wish to shield college students with out traumatizing them, a balancing act that, as Snowflake discovered, could be very tough.
It’s one thing that has drawn the eye of lawmakers. “There’s broad consensus affirming what dad and mom already know—necessary lively faculty shooter drills are deeply traumatizing for youngsters and haven’t any proof of reducing fatalities,” Democratic Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington wrote on X in September, saying a Congressional modification that might prohibit taxpayer {dollars} from being appropriated to varsities that don’t let college students decide out of lively shooter drills.
And in 2021, a invoice launched by Colorado Democratic Congressman Ed Perlmutter would have ordered the Nationwide Academies of Science, Engineering, and Drugs, to check and determine finest practices for maximizing the effectiveness of college security drills in addition to the psychological well being results of those drills. The invoice was ultimately folded into an Appropriations invoice and handed; the Nationwide Academies report got here out in August 2025.
However an rising physique of analysis reveals that there are finest practices for how one can put together college students for lively shooters in faculties—although faculties throughout the nation might not be following them.
Find out how to higher put together college students for lively shooters
The very first thing to know is that drills are efficient, says Jaclyn Schildkraut, the manager director of the Regional Gun Violence Analysis Consortium on the Rockefeller Institute of Authorities. However there’s a distinction between lockdown drills and lively shooter drills, and there’s proof that lockdown drills are more practical and fewer traumatic than the latter, she says.
Lockdown drills train college students and academics to lock the door of their lecture rooms, flip off the lights, be quiet, and get away from the place they are often seen. There are solely 4 cases the place somebody has been killed behind a locked door in a faculty capturing, and in a kind of cases, the lock failed, she says. “The primary lifesaving gadget in an lively shooter occasion is the door lock,” she says.
Although it might sound easy to lock a door and get college students away from the road of sight, there’s undoubtedly a have to follow this, she says, as a result of college students and academics alike have to construct muscle reminiscence. “Conditions like lively shooter occasions are extremely worrying,” she says. “However your physique will do what you might have educated it to do.”
The benefit of a lockdown drill is that it features a very particular set of procedures which academics and college students can comply with, she says. In distinction, calling one thing an lively shooter drill can imply many alternative issues, and college students and academics will be requested to carry out in quite a lot of alternative ways—together with performing out a drill with simulations, which analysis suggests is extra traumatic than it’s invaluable.
“We don’t set a faculty on fireplace for a hearth drill, we don’t have to simulate an lively shooter to follow a lockdown,” Schildkraut says.
The August 2025 report from the Nationwide Academies of Science, Engineering and Drugs, argued that states ought to prohibit the usage of drills that simulate an lively shooter being within the faculty, in addition to sensorial drills. These workouts are sometimes extraordinarily lifelike, typically utilizing pretend bullets or the noise of gunshots, and the report concluded that they’re one of many practices that “skilled consensus largely agrees shouldn’t be carried out because of the excessive potential to trigger hurt.”
“The thought is you’re simulating a disaster occasion since you’re making an attempt to have individuals be capable of reply in a context that might be much like what may occur in actual life,” says Dr. David Schoenfeld, the director of the Nationwide Heart for Faculty Disaster and Bereavement at Youngsters’s Hospital Los Angeles and one of many individuals who helped put together the report. “And so then it looks like actual life, after which it’s extra distressing.”
In fact, faculties additionally shouldn’t be too imprecise when speaking to college students about why they’re doing a lockdown drill. Saying that they’re doing a drill in case a moose or bear will get into the hallways might make the state of affairs not appear critical or real to kids, Schoenfeld says. As a substitute, academics might say they’re locking the door in case somebody desires to begin a battle, for example.
Colleges also needs to not faux {that a} drill is an precise lively shooter occasion, as occurred in Snowflake, says Schildkraut. Individuals have to know that they’re simply practising and that they aren’t in a real-world emergency.
One other follow that may do extra hurt than good is one thing referred to as an options-based drill, which primarily asks academics and untrained professionals to resolve how to answer an lively shooter within the second. These embrace locations that train individuals a so-called “run, disguise, battle” response through which individuals should resolve how one can react, and ALICE coaching, which is utilized in many faculty districts and which supplies individuals choices together with Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate.
“The choices-based drills actually come nearer to recreating the state of affairs,” says Schoenfeld. “However they haven’t been proven to result in higher actions on the a part of members, and there’s some restricted analysis that has sort of prompt it could really work counter to what you’re making an attempt to attain.”
What works is for faculties to let dad and mom and college students know prematurely that there’s going to be a lockdown drill, to be instructed that they’re going by a drill whereas they’re doing it, and for academics to mannequin calm habits throughout that lockdown drill. Then, afterwards, there needs to be time for college kids and academics to debate what occurred, says Aurora Vasquez, the senior vp of state coverage for Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit created by individuals whose family members had been killed within the 2012 Sandy Hook faculty capturing.
“College students have given examples of being in a quiz when an lively shooter drill occurred after which going again to the quiz proper after,” she says. “They stated that’s not tremendous useful for them, as they wish to debrief.”
Lastly, Vasquez says, college students needs to be allowed to opt-out of any drills. That manner, in the event that they’ve encountered earlier trauma or violence, they will keep away from producing much more trauma by practising lively shooter drills.
“Analysis has proven that if a drill is carried out as a lockdown drill with out choices primarily based approaches, with out simulations, with out excessive depth, that for the overwhelming majority of youngsters, it doesn’t have to trigger an excessive amount of misery,” Schoenfeld says.
Ought to drills occur in any respect?
There are numerous states taking this analysis and making an attempt to use it to how they put together college students for lively shooter occasions. In 2024, New York state banned lifelike faculty lockdown drills, barring the usage of props, actors, or simulations. The identical 12 months, California additionally banned the usage of simulated fireplace in lively shooter drills and required that oldsters learn {that a} drill is going down.
However many different states are persevering with on as regular—and even going the other manner. In Missouri, for instance, a brand new regulation requires college students to take part in lively shooter workouts within the 2026-2027 faculty 12 months; workers might also take part in simulated lively shooter drills. The simulations will be jarring: in a video that not too long ago surfaced on social media, a coach shoots blanks within the air in entrance of college lockers as workers at a Missouri faculty had been going by coaching workouts.
The discrepancies between what states are doing and what analysis suggests they need to be doing is one motive Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez launched the Congressional modification prohibiting faculties from receiving sure federal funds in the event that they don’t enable college students to decide out of lively shooter drills. The modification wouldn’t have an effect on lockdown or fireplace drills, solely lively shooter drills.
“If I’ve to signal a permission slip for a kid to be concerned in a ropes course, there looks like there’s a cognitive dissonance if I’m not capable of decide out of an lively shooter drill,” says Gluesenkamp Perez, who determined to introduce the modification after her three-year-old needed to take part in an lively shooter drill in daycare and began speaking about capturing dangerous guys for the primary time in his life.
The invoice handed by the Home Appropriations Committee on Sept. 9. The subsequent step can be for the total Home to vote on the invoice.
Others say that the controversy over drills presents a chance to rethink how we cease gun violence within the first place. “The discourse round gun violence prevention in faculties has for a really very long time targeted on what can we be doing within the second of a violent act,” says Sonali Rajan, senior analysis director at Everytown for Gun Security, the biggest gun violence prevention group within the U.S. “That’s against stepping again and saying, what are all of the methods through which we will and needs to be meaningfully stopping this type of violence from occurring within the first place?”
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