Schools must consider students’ mental health when planning active shooter drills

N’dea Moore-Petinak

Hear N’dea’s interview with Michigan News about this research

Gun violence incidents have increased nationally in recent years, including in educational settings. As a response to this increase, schools across the US have introduced active shooter drills (also known as lockdown drills). 92% of schools in the United States now report that they have a plan in place for a school shooting incident.

But despite this widespread uptake of active shooter drills, relatively few studies examine their effectiveness -or their effect on young people. My recent paper with colleagues Marika Waselewski, Blaire Alma Patterson and Tammy Chang in the Journal of Adolescent Health addresses this problem. Given that drills in themselves can potentially impact the mental health and wellbeing of the young people engaging in them, we think it is important to understand their experiences and opinions surrounding active shooter drills. 

To do this, we used My Voice, a national text message poll of youth ages 14-24, which invites participants to share their experiences and opinions on salient policy issues. We analyzed their qualitative responses using thematic analysis.

68.5% of our respondents reported attending a school that had active shooter drills. Responses clustered around three key themes. First, the way that drills are carried out varies a great deal from school to school, suggesting that we might need to further examine what evidence-based practice looks like and how it could be disseminated across the country.

Second, respondents talked about the emotional distress caused by active shooter drills, with a majority of respondents saying that they drills made them feel unsafe, scared, helpless or sad.

And while many students were clear about the emotional impact of active shooter drills, many of our respondents questioned the benefits. Taken together, The negative impact described by our respondents of active shooter drills on their emotional wellbeing and the questions that youth had about the benefits of drills suggest that we need to change the way we think about and organize these activities.

Vitally, procedures should be centered around evidence-based methods, such as ‘Run, Hide, Fight’, which provides an easy to recall and effective shortlist of actions in the event that a real active shooter is present. And mental health professionals should be involved in designing and planning these activities to ensure that drills do not induce emotional distress. 

The bottom line is that schools should consider carefully the impact that active shooter drills have on the mental health of their students. While drills do help students feel prepared, they have their own negative impacts that need to be taken into account.