Biden’s executive order aims to help schools improve active shooting drills

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Shortly after Robert Murtfield’s child started kindergarten, the school began an unannounced lockdown drill.

His child was only five years old and, Murtfield recalls, didn’t really understand that it was just a drill and not a real school shooting. Murtfield himself was also shocked.

“I joined with another parent who, like me, also grew up abroad, and here we had a problem with the system,” said Murtfield, who grew up in Germany. “We noticed that a lot of American parents didn’t necessarily have this problem or didn’t think about it at all.”

That’s why Murtfield decided to advocate for reforming the way schools conduct these drills. His efforts led to changes at his school, which began informing parents in advance of the practice start date and giving them the option to opt out of their participation. His work also influenced this New York State Legislation this now requires schools to notify parents in advance of lockdown drills and conduct them in a “trauma-informed, developmentally and age-appropriate manner.”

Murtfield has company. As drills and simulations become more common in American schools and universities, organizations representing school psychologists, law enforcement and others are lobbying to improve them and reduce their negative impact on students.

Now the federal government is also paying attention. President Joe Biden signed the deal last month executive order undertaking a multi-agency effort to develop guidelines and share resources that will make active firearms training safer and more effective.

The initiative is the result of the work of the White House Office to Prevent Gun Violence, which the Biden administration created in 2023 and is overseen by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate.

“When Vice President Harris traveled to meet with young leaders across the country, she asked them who had gone through these exercises, and everyone in the room raised their hands, showing that this was very disturbing to students,” said Rob Wilcox, director of the Office of the Associate Director .

One key aspect of Biden’s executive order is for the federal government to provide information on “how to prevent or reduce trauma or mental distress associated with active shooter training.”

Several groups already have some ideas they want to share. Organizations such as the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) and the National Association of School Response Officials (NASRO) have collaborated to gather evidence and create guidelines on best practices. Their cooperation could bear fruit by reviving federal interest.

Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, NASP’s director of policy and advocacy, said both groups have already contacted the agencies responsible for implementing the executive order.

“We very much hope that whatever the federal government puts forward will be largely consistent with the guidance we have been refining over the last ten years,” Strobach said. “We also hope this is evidence-based. While there is still a lack of empirical research on this topic, there is research that can be referenced.”

How opinions on school closure exercises have changed

Lockdown drills are intended to prepare students for various situations in which a threat is present in the school building, such as during an active shooter.

The likelihood of a student being in an active shooter situation remains statistically very low. The opposite is true for lockdown drills: 95.5% of U.S. schools conducted them during the 2021-2022 school year, according to data. National Center for Education Statistics.

But as the drills became more common, there were also reports of horrific depictions of violence in schools. Such cases have appeared using gunshot sounds, students pretending to be fake blood as victims, AND adults playing the role of attackers.

These dramatic – and potentially traumatic – tools represent an inability to understand the differences between exercises that are designed to build confidence and reduce student anxiety and simulations, which are high-stress scenarios designed to prepare law enforcement for situations like this one involving active shooters, said Mo Canady, executive director of NASRO.

Agencies and districts “have begun to provide students with full-scale situational training in the school environment,” Canady said. “As time went on, we started to look at it closely and ask ourselves if we were doing the right thing, especially with the teenagers in the building.”

Despite stories from students and teachers, there is little evidence of the impact of lockdown procedures such as drills and simulations on students’ mental health. According to Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Consortium for Research on Gun Violence at the State University of New York, the research does not distinguish between different exercises that can be used or isolate factors that may contribute to increased anxiety among college students. Rockefeller Institute of Government.

There are several studies showing the positive effects of engaging in isolation and discussion-based exercises, such as “making students feel more prepared, lowering their anxiety, helping them reduce their fear of harm, or reducing the likelihood of them noticing that harm may occur.” to a school shooting’ at their school,” Schildkraut said.

One of these studies found that nearly 87% of middle and high school students signed up feeling more prepared to respond to a violent incident after discussion-based training.

Other research indicates that regardless of the benefits they may provide to schools in preparing for violent incidents, many students believe that isolation exercises themselves are harmful.

The Social Dynamics and Well-Being Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in partnership with the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, analyzed social media conversations about U.S. schools before and after the drills. The latter group is affiliated with Everytown for Gun Safety, which supports an assault weapons ban and other measures to prevent gun violence.

They observed “a 42% increase in anxiety and stress (as evidenced by increases in words such as fear, struggling, and nervous) and a 39% increase in depression (as evidenced by words such as therapy, coping, irritability, suicidal thoughts) after exercise” – they claim reportwhich was originally published in 2020.

Before Biden issued his executive order, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study on the effects of active shooter drills on the health and well-being of students. The study has not been conducted, but it could help implement the executive order.

Reducing student trauma from active shooter drills

NASP, NASRO guidelines The promise of Sandy Hookand other organizations are providing guidance on what the guidance expected by Biden’s executive order might include.

These three groups recommend that exercise be part of a larger multi-hazard prevention strategy.

“It’s important to practice emergency procedures to limit chaos in the event of an emergency,” said Strobach, of the school’s psychology group. “But to conduct fire drills, you don’t necessarily have to light a fire. Schools can therefore prepare for any type of crisis without simulating it.”

The experts Chalkbeat spoke with agreed that full-scale simulations should not be part of students’ routines and that approaches should include a variety of methods to prepare them for emergencies.

For example, NASP and NASRO guidelines suggest that schools use strategies such as “discussion-based exercises,” such as workshops and orientation activities, so that students can talk about the exercises before they conduct them.

The guidelines do not recommend excluding “action-based” exercises, but do make some recommendations about them.

One of them is conducting instructions, during which children can read the instructions in detail and ask questions while performing the exercise. Once children are ready for this, the next step will be to practice lockdown more often.

Biden also emphasized that he wants to have access to resources to communicate with students, families and others “both about the drills and when to conduct them,” said Wilcox of the White House Office to Prevent Gun Violence.

The president also wants to ensure the executive order focuses on civil rights laws and special populations such as students with disabilities, Wilcox noted. The reports highlighted situations where needs were not addressed during exercises children with physical disabilitiesFor example.

Researchers also indicate that exercise may have a stronger impact on the emotional health of children who have gone through previous trauma.

Ultimately, however, what follows from the White House order will not be mandatory, so it will be up to local leaders to follow the guidelines and use resources.

“We hope this information will help leaders at all levels prevent and eliminate additional trauma and harm to our students,” Wilcox said.

Wellington Soares is a national education reporting intern at Chalkbeat based in New York. Contact Wellington at [email protected].