How to handle my anxiety on "active shooter" drills at school?

October 27, 2015 12:10 PM

So, my daughter's daycare/pre-school is doing a "safety awareness" week. Yesterday was fire safety, there was a firetruck there, the kids practiced what to do in an emergency. Today it's earthquake safety. Tomorrow, it's "Silent Evacuation / Active Shooter." This is causing me some intense anxiety. I haven't done a whole lot to prepare my four-year-old for the fact that if someone in her community has access to firearms and they feel upset that they might try to murder all the teachers and students.

I have also failed in arming her so she can shoot back and save the day. What's been your experience with this kind of thing with your kid? Is there a resource so that I can talk to her about any questions she might have after this experience? We spend so much time reassuring her that there are no monsters out there, I'm kind of unprepared to discuss which monsters are actually out there and why.

posted by amanda to Society & Culture (22 answers total)

Best answer: Here's an article on the topic you may find interesting, written by a teacher of a similar age group.
posted by teremala at 12:15 PM on October 27, 2015 [11 favorites]

Honestly, the school is a bit irresponsible in bombarding this age kids with all these reasons to be terrified. I'm currently working with a youngster who reacted in a very negative way to his schools half day long assembly about bullies and suicide.

If I were you, I would check in with her about her thoughts regarding the events, determine if there are any excessive fears that she is dealing with, and, if so, address those in a reassuring manner.

I think the last thing you want to do is magnify the terror already being heaped on her by the well meaning school.

And, question the school about the wisdom of terror overload.
posted by HuronBob at 12:16 PM on October 27, 2015 [18 favorites]

Yes, I would suggest keeping her home tomorrow, or all week for that matter. There is no point in trying to prepare a four-year-old to handle a disaster.
posted by kindall at 12:19 PM on October 27, 2015 [35 favorites]

The article linked above by teremala should be read by every school administrator and board of education. thanks for the link. And, I agree with the suggestion above, it would be a good day for a bit of home schooling and a trip to the zoo.
posted by HuronBob at 12:20 PM on October 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I don't think you need to go into detail about the why's of a silent evacuation, and certainly there are no upsides to getting into a conversation with a pre-schooler about deranged killers with guns...

With my 3 kids, I positioned it as 'just another drill the school wants to practice so that everyone can be safe, just like for earthquakes or fires'. At age 4, that should be plenty to frame the experience in a safe way.

Edited to add that this is a silent evacuation, not a lock-down drill, so should be easier to help your child understand that 'this is another way we practice leaving the school if something happens that isn't safe, just like an earthquake or fire.' And then emphasizing the unlikelihood that either of those events should ever happen, but always best to be prepared, just in case.
posted by widdershins at 12:23 PM on October 27, 2015 [19 favorites]

So my kids' school didn't do shooter drills (at least not that was aware of) but one day they got an actual shooter lockdown as there was a man with a gun who had shot a couple people and who was eventually captured a couple blocks from their school. Yay for moving to the USA.

I would take you kid's lead on this one - kids can get anxious about stuff that doesn't phase you (my son went for a couple years of not wanting to walk into his classroom when younger although everything else was fine?) and can be pretty calm about other stuff (my kids didn't seem that upset about being on actual school lockdown). If she asks questions that article is a great resource but I don't know if you have to try to get ahead of this for her by soliciting her opinions on the drill. I think from a kid's point of view it's not that different from a fire drill or an earthquake drill both of which are similarly unlikely yet worth preparing for. But it all depends on her perception of it, less so on your perception.
posted by GuyZero at 12:30 PM on October 27, 2015

My daughter was in kindergarten the year Sandy Hook happened. Her school does active shooter / silent evacuation drills, and I hate them, and I hate that they need them. I told my daughter that they were practicing what to do if a bear or something showed up at school. (This is, while stretching the notion of plausibility to nearly its breaking point, not technically impossible; our county's animal control does deal with bears and mountain lions semi-regularly, albeit in more mountainous and more rural parts of the county than ours.) We just call them "bear drills" now; she's nine, and she knows what they're really there for, but the wild animal premise is enough to add a layer of comforting abstraction.
posted by KathrynT at 12:30 PM on October 27, 2015 [25 favorites]

While I agree with the sentiments of the linked article, I think you can probably trust the school not to hand too much of that anxiety to your daughter. I'm young enough to have had these when I was in (high) school, and the language around them was extremely vague and non-committal. They didn't go into a "guns and murder" level of detail. They just described it as something like an "emergency" or "hazardous situation" on or near campus. They also did not have anyone act out the role of a shooter. We were just given three levels of lockdown and over the intercom they calmly announced each level, then announced when the drill was over.
posted by capricorn at 12:31 PM on October 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

Okay, I grew up during the "duck and cover" years, and we did nuclear attack drills where we were told to crouch in the hallway together, which I'm pretty sure would have protected us not at all. It sucks that these drills are a thing. I hope they actually work - it does sound like there have been situations where they have saved lives, and that makes it seem more worth doing than avoiding.

In my experience, the teachers don't do these drills to scare the kids, and don't explain them at all to the youngest participants. It's just a safety drill, like a fire drill, with the understanding that you may never ever need to use it for real. Traumatizing the kids is in no one's best interests.

You can call the school and ask what the language and procedures are that they will be using. My guess is that they won't be talking about a "shooter" to the kids at all. I know in my kid's school, there's "yellow level drill" and "red level drill," and he's in second grade.
posted by Mchelly at 12:39 PM on October 27, 2015 [6 favorites]

Best answer: I think you should ask more questions about what, exactly, the drill entails. Like all schools in my state, my kids' schools now do one "lockdown" drill every year, but far and away the largest two uses for the "lockdown" procedure are a missing child or a parental custody-dispute situation (where a parent without custody shows up at the school hoping to "pick up" their kid "for a doctor's appointment" or something like that). The #2 reason is if there has been an incident of violence in the community and there is an armed individual actively fleeing the cops, they will often do a "soft lock down" on the schools in the area for half an hour. (Which basically means no outdoor recess.) Parents always get a notification explaining the lockdown; half the time the kids don't even remember it by the time school is over, and if you prod them, they're like, "Oh, yeah, I guess we had lockdown for 15 minutes because Joey was hiding in a broom closet to avoid his math test and they had to look for him." While it is CALLED a "lockdown/active shooter" drill in the handbook, the kids are mostly NOT AWARE of the active shooter portion, it's not "acted out" in any way during the drill, and the uses of the lockdown itself are almost all to do with very routine, non-violent child safety issues. My kids experience it 100% as just one more inexplicable oddity of adult administration of the school -- every now and then, they say there's a lockdown and you have to stay in the classroom an extra five minutes before changing classes. (They do ask the kids to be relatively quiet, but they also have to do that during fire and tornado drills so they can hear instructions, it's not presented as scary.)

The other thing that sometimes happens during "official" lockdown drills is, much like the fire department comes to observe a fire drill and make sure it's safe, your local police may visit the school during the "lockdown" drill and walk the halls with the administrators to look for specific kinds of dangers that are sometimes hard to see when there are no kids in the building (or when they're all there but moving around) -- again, 90% of those are "this door by the dumpster has no alarm but kids using the gym could get out it without an adult seeing, maybe we should mount a mirror or alarm it during gym periods." Often newer precinct officers who might be called to respond to the school (again NOT for school gun violence -- for custody disputes, or fistfights at a basketball game, or lost children) will attend the lockdown drill to get to know the school and administrators a bit better.

I think it's pretty dumb that my state mandates lockdown drills, and I'm not thrilled about them putting these ideas in my kids' heads. However, schools around here have done a great job turning lockdown drills into an actually useful tool for situations they actually face (kids running off) and to strengthen school/police ties, rather than as a way to scare kids to no purpose.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:50 PM on October 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

I told my daughter that they were practicing what to do if a bear or something showed up at school. (This is, while stretching the notion of plausibility to nearly its breaking point, not technically impossible; our county's animal control does deal with bears and mountain lions semi-regularly, albeit in more mountainous and more rural parts of the county than ours.)

This is what I tell my second-graders, and it's not even a lie at all. We've called intruder drills because of dogs and coyotes on campus before.

Every time we have a training on a school shooter scenario, I ask some really pointed questions of the presenter about the odds of it happening at a random elementary school (which are extremely low), and the presenter, who's being paid for this, obviously, kind of hems and haws about being prepared just in case.

I don't ask to try to change his mind, I just want the other teachers and administrators to think about the fact that it's far more likely that a child will be killed by a car accident near a school than by a school shooter.
posted by Huck500 at 12:51 PM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

My son's preschool had a mandatory "Code Red Drill" and he did not come home terrorized. I had to look up what a code red drill was, to be sure. I am certain they did not tell the kids it was for an active shooter.

If your daughter has questions, answer them honestly but with as little information as possible to answer the exact literal question she asked. If she asks a follow-up, do the same. Continue until there are no more questions.
posted by telepanda at 12:52 PM on October 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

My first grader went through an active shooter drill, last year in kindergarten, and she was completely unfazed by it. I asked her a couple of questions about it and just told her that no matter what, in an emergency of any kind she needs to listen to her teacher. I don't think the word "shooter" was even mentioned.

The school district sent home detailed information about it for parents, but at that point she couldn't really read so I wasn't concerned about her seeing it.

I was VERY anxious about it, much moreso than she was. I was a very anxious kid and this kind of thing, I think, would have scared the crap out of me, but she is not me, and she was fine with it. I think the teachers really set the tone of it. They were not worried, so she was not worried.

That said: She had just turned 4 after the Boston Marathon bombing, and we live in one of the communities that was totally shut down during the manhunt for the two Tsarnaev brothers. The younger one was captured maybe 2 miles from my house. She was asking all day long why daycare was closed, why we were home, why we couldn't go outside, and we gave her a pretty simple answer. There was a bad guy outside, and the police were looking for him. My husband and I were literally chatting/freaking out over gchat, while in the same house, because we didn't want her to be scared. She never did seem scared but she asked about it for *months* afterward. She still mentions it sometimes and it obviously made an impression on her. But she's never been asking fearfully, just with curiosity.

My policy with both my kids is to answer their questions but not to go overboard. This goes for nearly anything. Kid asks how babies are made and you start off with putting a sperm into an egg in a uterus. My 6-year-old has still not asked me HOW the sperm and egg get in the uterus. I literally just answer her question and then wait to be asked the following one. Sometimes she asks, sometimes she doesn't.

Kids tend to be pretty literal and simple at this age, and I think if your kid's teachers are calm, and you are calm, it will be fine. But you're also totally within your rights to take her out of school that day. She's only 4 and the actual possibility of an active shooter is probably pretty remote. There's no harm if she misses it, and if it freaks you out you will probably feel better keeping her home. It's daycare - it's not like she's missing out on important lessons in math or science or something.
posted by sutel at 12:54 PM on October 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

Silent Evacuation is going to be just that-- your 4-year-old is going to have the novel experience of going outside in an organized fashion without making noise, and won't have any idea what eventuality they're practicing for. Gently teaching this drill and letting your daughter know what is expected for this drill (following instructions, keeping in a line with her class, being quiet when asked) means she stands a far better chance of pulling it off if the worst thing happens.

> I grew up during the "duck and cover" years, and we did nuclear attack drills where we were told to crouch in the hallway together, which I'm pretty sure would have protected us not at all.

Duck and Cover's actually pretty good protection for areas outside the immediate lethal blast area. outside that area, there's a really huge region full of people whose buildings will be standing after the blast, but they will be faced, literally, with lots of flying glass and debris, or radioactive dust, and duck and cover makes the difference between stunned and slightly dazzled people who are able to walk out of the blast zone, and people who have been blinded by flying crap, bleeding from cuts, and are all set to overwhelm any medical efforts still standing or brought in. If you're old enough to have carried out Duck and Cover, you're old enough to have been in the target area of pretty inaccurate ballistic missiles that lacked the benefit of GPS. No telling where that thing would land, even if the White House was down the street from your school.
posted by Sunburnt at 12:55 PM on October 27, 2015 [3 favorites]

I worked at a preschool that had a lockdown due to a possible active shooter (connected with an investigation by Child and Family services - basically a teacher had reported possible abuse and the parent became unhinged), six weeks after Sandy Hook. To tell you this was a horrible experience for me as an adult is not the half of it. Despite what other commenters have said above, the need for "silent lockdown" is pretty common anywhere there are groups of kids, for all sorts of reasons (not just limited to actual shooters).

As much as we would like to think these sorts of things will never happen, the fact of the matter is that they can and they very well might - sad to say, it is just as likely that your child might have to be in a building under lockdown as it is that your child might go through the experience of a serious earthquake.

I was in administration, not a teacher, but my experience in that facility tells me that these sorts of drills make things less scary for kids, not more scary. Because our kids (again, preschool, ages 2 - 5, about half with special needs) had practiced what to do if there was danger in the building, it gave them a framework to talk openly about scary things (and lots of things are scary to kids that age, not just the kind of things that scare us as parents). Because we had done drills, our kids understood what to do when there was a real emergency, and certainly if you Google around you can find many examples of kids who "saved the day" in a house fire or other emergency because they knew to call 911 or other protocols to follow.

Also, unless you homeschool, this will be an ongoing thing (just like a fire drill) in pretty much any school your child attends, at least for the foreseeable future.

Keeping things secret and hidden generally makes kids more afraid. Giving kids the tools they need to keep themselves safe is empowering for them and lets them face their fears head on.
posted by anastasiav at 1:01 PM on October 27, 2015 [6 favorites]

In my town (in RI), schools do fourteen drills -- fire drills, shooters, other stuff -- per year. With 181 school days per year, that's every two or three weeks.

I don't think that the school needs to be telling your little one that "this is what we do when an angry man with a firearm tries to do us harm," but she should get an explanation that might extend as far as "sometimes we all need to leave quickly and quietly."

*shrug* Last spring there was a lockdown when a creepy dude was hanging around the woods at the middle school, and another one at our grade school. I am glad they have the drills, but hotly wish it wasn't necessary.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:05 PM on October 27, 2015

In that same town in RI, my daughter's elementary school did have an active shooter lockdown because the suspect in an armed robbery down the street was fleeing toward the school on foot. Four is young, yes, but my daughter was six when this happened. I also wish this wasn't necessary, but, unfortunately it is.
posted by Ruki at 1:40 PM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

As a child growing up in the '70s and in the Southeast, we practiced what to do in the event that a tornado came through the school, what to do in the event the building burned down, and while I don't remember any drills specifically on nuclear bombs dropping on us (I think by the '70s they were figuring out it wouldn't really matter), we were given pamplets on what to do if we had to deal with nuclear fallout.

The pamplets on dealing with nuclear fallout were the main thing I remember bothering me. I hadn't read much sci-fi yet, but it didn't take much imagination (undoubtedly fueled by news and other information about nuclear bombs - my parents always watched the news) to think about a dystopian future after the bombs were dropped.

As others have said, I'm sure the teachers will couch this stuff in euphemism. Kids have a way of processing this stuff.
posted by randomkeystrike at 1:45 PM on October 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Sandy Hook happened when my son was in second and the school started locking all the doors and doing drills. Some of the kids knew exactly what those drills were for and knowledge spread down until the kindergartners knew it was about shooters.

I was present for a real one. A drug thing in the vicinity. Bullets broke windows in the library during a book drive. It sucks that they have to deal with this, but the kids were calm, smart, and good. The older ones were pulling the younger ones down and the adults were herding everyone away from the windows and it went well. Nobody panicked because they were prepared.

I'm kind of unprepared to discuss which monsters are actually out there and why.

I have always been blunt with my kid. His mom sugarcoats everything, she talks about rainbow bridges and I say the dog is dead. Guess who he trusts with his burning questions?

We've talked about abduction, sexual abuse, witnessing violence, fire and a bunch of other nasties. My take is that you don't have these conversations over dinner. You have them in the big bed, in the dark, with both your arms around them and the questions percolate a few days or weeks later.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 1:51 PM on October 27, 2015 [13 favorites]

Best answer: I'm a teacher who has done these drills for many years, albeit in high school. A few years ago, local police did a talk on why these drills were so important, which I'll paraphrase here. No children have died in school fires in many decades for numerous reasons, one of them being that schools have mandated, timed fire drills once a month. Should a fire occur, everyone knows exactly what to do, where to do, etc. The officers said that, basically, in the case of a shooting in a school building, there are eight minutes from start to finish, i.e. the attacker is either killed by a SWAT team or commits suicide. Every second counts, and little things can make a big difference. For example, it's actually probably safer to run out of the building if you're near an exit than hunker down in a locked room. Of course, there's always the risk that an attacker is at said exit but still it's probably a safer bet. Apparently, this all came from a book analyzing mass shootings, which is sad and depressing to think about but also important to discuss because it's an unfortunate reality of living in the US (and many other countries) today.

Something to consider: these drills are to help prepare educators even more than students so we can keep your children safe. These days, becoming a teacher also means you're promising to put your life on the line for students. Part of that safety talk was on how we as teachers can try to fight back and help physically shield children if a shooter does get into our classroom. It's morose, yes, but pretending it isn't there isn't going to make the societal problem go away. We can hope for the best but also prepare for the worst without it overtaking our thoughts. It's scary, yes, but the knowledge can make us feel -- or at least -- be a bit more empowered. I think it's good that you're considering how to talk about this now because it's the start of a conversation that will take place for their entire lives.

I think you'd benefit most from speaking to public safety officers about how they discuss this with children. They have experience in explaining this to young children in a way that is caring, careful, serious, and sympathetic.
posted by smorgasbord at 3:38 PM on October 27, 2015 [17 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks everyone for sharing their experiences, resources and perspectives. Feeling a bit better about this. I also spoke with the school directors late this afternoon and they said that it would very much be a "listen to the teachers, be quiet, follow directions" kind of drill. Everyday when they go to the park, they do "marshmallow mouth" on the way through the school which is basically, no talking. So that they can listen to the teacher, not disturb the other kids and don't disintegrate into loons on the way there. My kid loves this kind of following directions right now so I'm feeling okay both about her abilities to do so and also her maybe missing tomorrow. My schedule is light tomorrow so we are going to do a hooky day.

The school also wanted me to know that these drills are as much for the staff as the students, if not more so. They have more in depth discussions with the staff about scenarios and for the kids it's mostly, here's how you follow this kind of direction. So exactly along the lines of what smorgasbord was saying above. Which, by the way, I can't read this without tearing up:

Part of that safety talk was on how we as teachers can try to fight back and help physically shield children if a shooter does get into our classroom.

I'm going to seek out more resources on this so that I can talk about some of this stuff with my child with some clarity and appropriatness. I am generally very comfortable with difficult topics but this really hits on some tough psychological areas. Thanks again.
posted by amanda at 7:59 PM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm also an educator. This year for the first time we went through ALICE training. That might be a good place to start your research. The basics are that we no longer lockdown and sit in classrooms and wait. We were trained to get kids out any way we can and fight back if we can't get out. We did simulations where police officers acted like active shooters and tried to get into rooms (just staff, no students for this part). We used belts, electrical cords, desks...anything we could...to keep them out. Even though we knew it was a simulation, more than one teacher was in tears when it was over. It was scary, but afterwards I felt so much more powerful. When we went through the drills with students, we emphasized being quiet and doing whatever their teacher told them without questioning or hesitating. If, heaven forbid, something happens at my school, we will not be sitting ducks; we will protect our kids and defend ourselves.
posted by Barnifer at 6:18 PM on October 28, 2015 [1 favorite]