School lockdown drills have become common, experts say they could be better
U.S. (CBS NEWS)– Serenity Seigel was 7 years old when she started worrying about a mass shooting at her school.
Her fears were sparked by the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, which left 20 children and six adults dead. As she grew up, she continued to see gun violence in the news, and in 2018, the Valentine’s Day mass shooting in Parkland, Florida left her anxious and worried about violence in her own North Indiana community.
In her freshman year of high school, she and her fellow students were shown a video simulation that showed their classmates playing dead while a police officer in a ski mask prowled the halls. Immediately following the screening, Seigel and her classmates practiced a lockdown procedure, hiding in the dark while a school official rattled doorknobs.
“Seeing a video that felt so real and seeing a gunman in the hallways of a school that I walk around every single day and people that I’ve grown up going to school with laying on the ground acting as if they’re dead was way too realistic for my anxious brain to be able to handle,” Seigel, now 19, told CBS News.
When the lights came back on, Seigel expected that she and her classmates would be able to talk about what they had just gone through — but instead, she said, class resumed as normal, and her third-period Spanish class began taking a test that she said she did terribly on because she was so rattled by the drill.
Students across the United States have experienced fear and anxiety like Seigel’s, especially as lockdown drills have become common in the 25 years since the Columbine High School massacre, which left 12 students, one teacher and the two perpetrators dead. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, and remains one of the most high-profile mass shootings. The trauma of the day was immortalized in live reports that were widely broadcast on local and national news, and the police response to the shooting led to the development of new policies to handle such incidents.
Before the Columbine shooting, schools practiced drills for fires and natural disasters. After the 1999 massacre, states enacted lockdown and active shooter drills, according to a report from the Federal School Safety Commission. As of 2024, about 95% of public schools in the U.S. practiced active shooter or lockdown drills in the 2015-2016 academic year, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, with more than 40 states requiring such drills. Research suggests that the drills can impact students’ mental health negatively, and there have been calls for change that could make the drills less upsetting.
