Lockdown drills happen in nearly every school, but the ubiquitous simulations don’t help teachers feel safer, according to a recent survey by the RAND Corporation.
And while the drills are intended to help students and school staff prepare for an emergency, more teachers than not also say the exercises don’t help them feel more prepared for the unthinkable.
The findings from the policy research organization offer a look at how safe teachers feel at work and their views on a school safety practice that became omnipresent after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Such drills generally involve locking classroom doors and instructing students to remain quiet in an identified safe space.
Just one-fifth of teachers said that lockdown drills make them feel safer at school, according to RAND’s nationally representative survey of over 1,000 teachers conducted in fall 2023. Most teachers—nearly 70 percent—said that participating in active shooter drills makes them feel neither safer nor less safe. Twelve percent of teachers said the drills made them feel less safe.
A greater proportion of teachers—47 percent—said the drills make them feel more prepared to respond to an active shooter incident. Still, more teachers—50 percent—said the drills have no impact on their sense of preparedness. A small proportion of teachers, 3 percent, said the drills make them feel less prepared.
“At least as far as teachers’ perceptions go, our survey shows that drills are not making teachers feel less safe,” said Pauline Moore, the lead researcher behind the survey, “but they’re not really making them feel more prepared or safer to the extent that we might hope given their frequency and their ubiquity at schools across the country.”
The survey is RAND’s second annual examination of teachers’ perceptions and experiences with school violence and lockdown drills.
Nearly all public schools, 96 percent, have a written plan detailing procedures in the case of an active shooter, and 93 percent have similar plans in the event of bomb threats or other emergencies, according to a 2022 report from the National Center for Education Statistics.
And in the 2023 RAND survey, 90 percent of teachers said they took part in an active shooter drill during the 2022-23 school year.
While school shootings are rare and mass shootings like those that generate widespread media coverage are even rarer, a significant number of teachers are impacted by gun violence at work. According to the survey, 1 in 6 teachers work in a school district that has been affected by gun violence since the 2019-20 school year.
Teachers have become more concerned about violence in schools
Overall, teachers have grown more fearful that they or their students will be attacked or harmed at school. Twenty-four percent of teachers said in the fall 2023 survey that they were afraid they would be the victims of an attack, up from 17 percent who said the same a year earlier.
Forty-seven percent of teachers said they are afraid for their students, up from 34 percent in 2022.
Female teachers, in particular, were more concerned for their safety than male teachers in 2023, with 27 percent of female teachers expressing concerns compared with 14 percent of male teachers.
That was also different from 2022, when there wasn’t a statistically significant difference in male and female teachers’ perceptions of their safety. It’s hard to say why female teachers feel less safe without further research, Moore said.
Overall, fear of school shootings remains relatively low, with only 6 percent of teachers identifying an active shooter as one of their top concerns in 2023. (In 2022, that figure was 5 percent.) That likely has to do with the rarity of school shootings, Moore said.
Instead, bullying and cyberbullying are the safety concerns at the top of teachers’ minds, with 46 percent of teachers in the 2023 survey identifying the issue as a concern. Thirteen percent of teachers identified student fights as a concern, and 11 percent named drugs.
Not all active shooter drills are created equal
Teachers reported a wide mix of actions their students are instructed to take during lockdown drills. The majority of teachers who have participated in drills say they lock classroom doors, shut off lights, hide in a designated space inside the classroom, stand out of view of windows and doors, and remain silent.
Some of those actions are more common at middle and high schools than elementary schools. For example, 61 percent of middle-school teachers said they barricade doors as part of their drills, and 52 percent of high-school teachers said the same. At elementary schools, that figure was 43 percent.
Middle and high schools are also more likely to instruct students to fight back against attackers by throwing objects, with 45 percent of middle-school teachers and 44 percent of high-school teachers identifying that as part of their drills. Only 29 percent of elementary school teachers said they instruct students to fight back against attackers.
Police participation in drills is also relatively common, according to the survey. Forty-four percent of teachers said police officers or other uniformed security personnel participate in safety drills. But the drills rarely include sensory elements, such as gunshot noises or fake blood, that are intended to mimic a violent incident. Only 6 percent of teachers said those elements are included in drills.
Those more realistic drills have generated pushback from educators and advocates, as they can traumatize students, Moore said. At least four states—Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, and Washington—have enacted laws banning schools from using hyper-realistic drills.
“It would be interesting to better understand how the integration of various elements—how the different actions that students are told to do or to engage in during a drill—then affect things like preparedness, but also things like feelings of being safe in school,” Moore said.
Many schools don’t notify parents of drills ahead of time
One of the more concerning findings, according to Moore, was that most schools don’t notify students, parents, and caregivers ahead of scheduled school shooter drills.
The National Association of School Psychologists, the National Association of School Resource Officers, and Safe and Sound Schools—a nonprofit that helps schools navigate shootings and other crises—all recommend that schools notify parents and caregivers ahead of school shooting drills.
“One of the important points of early notification of drills is for students to be able to opt out of a drill if they need to for whatever reason,” Moore said. “Maybe it’s because they have emotional difficulties or some other kind of disability that makes it especially difficult for them to participate in a drill that’s really designed for the broader student population.”
In the RAND survey, 86 percent of teachers said they receive advance notice of drills, while 37 percent said their schools give students advance notice. Only 28 percent said their schools notify parents or caregivers before drills.
When parents opt their children out of drills, school and district leaders can offer those students alternatives, such as walking through instructions to follow in emergencies to ensure they’re also aware of how to stay safe, Moore said.
Advance notice may also help reduce the stress lockdown drills can cause among students, Moore said.
Moore and other researchers at RAND plan to conduct a similar survey with students to gauge whether the drills help them feel safer and more prepared for school emergencies.
