When the Snowflake-Taylor police division within the excessive desert of Arizona performed an lively shooter drill at Snowflake Excessive College in October 2024, college students didn’t take it significantly, says police chief Bobby Martin. They have been wandering round campus, laughing, having conversations, and never locking doorways.
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So initially 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, induced extra confusion and panic than anticipated, Martin says.
“That was not how we have 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, you could be ready.”
College districts and legislation enforcement throughout the nation have been grappling with this problem as faculty shootings proceed unabated. There have been 208 faculty shootings up to now in 2025, after 336 in all of 2024, in accordance with the Ok-12 College Taking pictures Database and now, greater than 95% of public colleges carry out lockdown drills yearly.
However as Snowflake discovered, these drills may be traumatic to college students, particularly if they’re performed within the improper approach. One 2020 examine analyzed conversations over Twitter (now generally known as X) and Reddit earlier than and after lively shooter drills occurred, and located that the drills have been related to a rise in melancholy, stress, and anxiousness amongst kids and their dad and mom, and that issues 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 examine discovered.
Nonetheless, most consultants agree that working towards for lively shooter occasions is helpful, so putting off drills solely is normally not an possibility. Faculties need to defend college students with out traumatizing them, a balancing act that, as Snowflake discovered, may 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—obligatory lively faculty shooter drills are deeply traumatizing for youngsters and don’t have any proof of lowering fatalities,” Democratic Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington wrote on X in September, saying a Congressional modification that will 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 Medication, to review and establish greatest practices for maximizing the effectiveness of faculty security drills in addition to the psychological well being results of those drills. The invoice was finally 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 greatest practices for learn how to put together college students for lively shooters in colleges—although colleges throughout the nation might not be following them.
How one can higher put together college students for lively shooters
The very first thing to know is that drills are efficient, says Jaclyn Schildkraut, the chief 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 simpler and fewer traumatic than the latter, she says.
Lockdown drills educate college students and lecturers 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 positively a must follow this, she says, as a result of college students and lecturers alike must construct muscle reminiscence. “Conditions like lively shooter occasions are extremely tense,” she says. “However your physique will do what you’ve got educated it to do.”
The benefit of a lockdown drill is that it features a very particular set of procedures which lecturers and college students can observe, she says. In distinction, calling one thing an lively shooter drill can imply many various issues, and college students and lecturers may be requested to carry out in a wide range of other ways—together with appearing out a drill with simulations, which analysis suggests is extra traumatic than it’s precious.
“We don’t set a faculty on hearth for a fireplace drill, we don’t must simulate an lively shooter to follow a lockdown,” Schildkraut says.
The August 2025 report from the Nationwide Academies of Science, Engineering and Medication, 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 workout routines are sometimes extraordinarily lifelike, generally 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 attempting to have folks have the ability to reply in a context that will be much like what would possibly occur in actual life,” says Dr. David Schoenfeld, the director of the Nationwide Middle for College Disaster and Bereavement at Youngsters’s Hospital Los Angeles and one of many individuals who helped put together the report. “And so then it appears like actual life, after which it’s extra distressing.”
After all, colleges 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 severe or real to kids, Schoenfeld says. As a substitute, lecturers might say they’re locking the door in case somebody needs to begin a battle, as an example.
Faculties also needs to not fake {that a} drill is an precise lively shooter occasion, as occurred in Snowflake, says Schildkraut. Individuals must know that they’re simply working towards and that they don’t seem to be in a real-world emergency.
One other follow that may do extra hurt than good is one thing known as an options-based drill, which primarily asks lecturers and untrained professionals to resolve how to reply to an lively shooter within the second. These embrace locations that educate folks a so-called “run, disguise, battle” response through which folks must resolve learn how to react, and ALICE coaching, which is utilized in many faculty districts and which provides folks 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 individuals, and there’s some restricted analysis that has sort of recommended it might really work counter to what you’re attempting to attain.”
What works is for colleges to let dad and mom and college students know upfront that there’s going to be a lockdown drill, to be informed that they’re going by way of a drill whereas they’re doing it, and for lecturers to mannequin calm conduct throughout that lockdown drill. Then, afterwards, there ought to be time for college kids and lecturers to debate what occurred, says Aurora Vasquez, the senior vp of state coverage for Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit created by folks whose family members have 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 mentioned that’s not tremendous useful for them, as they need to debrief.”
Lastly, Vasquez says, college students ought to be allowed to opt-out of any drills. That approach, in the event that they’ve encountered earlier trauma or violence, they’ll keep away from producing much more trauma by working towards lively shooter drills.
“Analysis has proven that if a drill is performed as a lockdown drill with out choices based mostly approaches, with out simulations, with out excessive depth, that for the overwhelming majority of youngsters, it doesn’t must trigger a substantial amount of misery,” Schoenfeld says.
Ought to drills occur in any respect?
There are a lot of states taking this analysis and attempting 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 hearth in lively shooter drills and required that oldsters learn {that a} drill is going down.
However many different states are persevering with on as standard—and even going the other approach. In Missouri, for instance, a brand new legislation requires college students to take part in lively shooter workout routines within the 2026-2027 faculty 12 months; workers may take part in simulated lively shooter drills. The simulations may be jarring: in a video that lately surfaced on social media, a coach shoots blanks within the air in entrance of faculty lockers as workers at a Missouri faculty have been going by way of coaching workout routines.
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 colleges 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 hearth drills, solely lively shooter drills.
“If I’ve to signal a permission slip for a kid to be concerned in a ropes course, there appears like there’s a cognitive dissonance if I’m not in a position to 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 unhealthy guys for the primary time in his life.
The invoice handed by way of the Home Appropriations Committee on Sept. 9. The following step can be for the complete Home to vote on the invoice.
Others say that the controversy over drills presents a possibility to rethink how we cease gun violence within the first place. “The discourse round gun violence prevention in colleges 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 most important gun violence prevention group within the U.S. “That’s against stepping again and saying, what are all of the methods through which we are able to and ought to be meaningfully stopping this sort of violence from taking place within the first place?”
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