Let's talk about school lockdowns
Have you ever thought about why kids lock down inside classrooms when people (including children) are told to 'run, hide, fight' in every other type of place?
Shooting at a movie theater full of kids…run, hide, fight.
Shooting at an amusement park full of kids…run, hide, fight.
Shooting at a shopping mall full of kids…run, hide, fight.
Shooting at a outdoor festival full of kids…run, hide, fight.
Shooting at a daytime concert full of kids…run, hide, fight.
Shooting at a school full of kids…hide under your desk and stay quiet.
When you stop and think about it, with just about every dangerous situation we encounter in life, we instinctively run away from it. Getting as far away from an attacker, explosion, gas leak, falling object, aggressive animal, rushing flood water, or anything dangerous is a good idea. When a man with a rifle entered Robb Elementary in Uvalde, TX, children had not been taught to run away and 19 of them tragically died inside their classroom. Even worse, according to ProPublica’s investigation, the kids inside the classroom in Uvalde were so quiet that officers didn’t think anyone was inside.
Before we get into the origins and problems with school lockdowns, an important aside: ‘Run, hide, fight’ came from a production company contracted to create a PSA for the City of Houston in 2008. There were no peer-reviewed studies or tests of the best actions to take in different scenarios. It was a catchy slogan that went viral.
The video itself is a horrific tutorial in how to be an active shooter, a term that was rarely used before this was produced.
While this guidance seems simple on the surface, many shootings happen in wide open public places with limited egress—malls, churches, subways, movie theaters—where running, hiding, or fighting isn’t really an option.
Problems with School Lockdowns
Good news - if reading my writing is boring, you can just listen to the New England Journal of Medicine’s Intention to Treat podcast and hear everything covered in this article (or on Youtube, cued up to my segment).
Big thanks to Robin Cogan from the National Association of School Nurses for making this episode happen. Robin and her sister, Merri Novell, unfortunately have a lifetime of experience with mass shootings. In the second half of the episode, Dr. Cornelia Griggs and I talk about school lockdowns. Dr. Griggs is a pediatric trauma surgeon and education director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Problem #1: Policy without research
There is no research or empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of school lockdowns compared to rapidly evacuating a school under different shooting scenarios (most of which don’t happen inside a classroom). A big part of this dearth of data is the CDC being banned from funding any gun violence related research.
In 1996, the Dickey Amendment essentially prevented the CDC from using any of its funding for anything that related to gun violence research. We never built the research institutions that would be studying all of the aspects of this problem, from systemic gun violence to suicides, to intimate partner violence, to mass shootings in schools. There would be research institutions that would’ve carved out niches and would be gathering this information. But in this one, the lack of information is so stark that we end up making public policy decisions based on assumptions rather than data.
Problem #2: School security industry drives training and products
I didn’t start the [K-12 School Shooting Database] project until 2018. And in 2018, there was no empirical evidence on the characteristics of shootings in schools. There was no good data available to analyze anything. Yet 20 years before Parkland, 1999, when Columbine happened, it spurred a school security industry, and it spurred the early lockdown procedures in schools. There was never a peer-reviewed study to find out if this is the best action to take. School shooting drills have really been built around a narrative, an image, a fantasy of this deranged outsider coming into the school and determined to get into every classroom, and in each classroom, they’re going to kill as many people as possible in the room. And that was really built out of Sandy Hook.
But somehow, without any evidence behind it, students are being told, “Sit quietly in your classroom even though danger is here, even though somebody is coming here specifically for you.” And that decision has never been based on any evidence. Overwhelmingly, across 60 years of school shootings, they’re almost all committed by a current or former student at that school, who knows the plan, knows where students are going to go, knows the layout of the building. When the shooter knows the drill and knows where the students are going to be, you can have a situation like Uvalde. Somebody who’s familiar with the school can plan an attack, and they know that when the first shot is fired, this is exactly what everyone will do. And if they get into one classroom, all of those students will be waiting there.
Problem #3: Every shooting is treated like a mass shooting
When there is only one plan for everything, that plan probably doesn’t work well for anything. Every school has a plan for a shooting, not all shootings at schools are the same. They can be inside or outside the building. Shooting in the hallway during lunch is different from a shooting inside classroom during classes. The majority of shooting in the last 10 years took place outside of the school building during dismissal.
One of the first things to do with any school security plan is look at prior incidents and say, “How many times would a lockdown have been helpful?” So last year, there were 305 different shootings at a school. Two of them were deliberate attacks. The other 303 were a time when a gun was fired, and in that moment, students hear gunshots, teachers hear gunshots, the school goes into lockdown usually for hours, for 3, 4, 5, 6 hours. And because everyone heard that gunshot, they think that it is the real thing. They’re texting their parents, “I love you, goodbye.” But in reality, what we can see from data is that the most common situation to happen at a school is a fight that escalates.
There are more teenagers carrying weapons than there have been at previous points in history, and when there’s a conflict, these conflicts are turning into shootings. And the shooter almost always runs immediately, so there’s no threat at the school anymore. But we only have one plan for when a shot is fired, and that’s lockdown. On the other end, when there is a deliberate attack — there have been 230 of those since 1966 — they don’t all happen in the classroom. But because Sandy Hook was a shooting in the classroom, everybody gravitated towards every shooting being a shooting in the classroom. And so we’ve created a plan around one scenario. In fact we have a much more complex landscape of different scenarios. And if you look at each one in detail, getting away from the school, getting as many people away from the school as fast as possible, is almost always the best thing that you can do.
Possible Solution
Surprise! Better data and actually using this data to inform policy and practice.
The way that we’re going to find solutions to this problem is through empirical evidence and basing public policy on data, not on assumptions. The school security industry has been built around ideas of what might happen. We have never looked in depth for the root causes of this problem, the downstream solutions, and whether the things that are being done are helpful or harmful. And until we take a close look at this issue to ask, “Are we doing the best thing for the kids in this classroom?” — and if people aren’t sure that that answer is yes, then we need to find a better solution for them.
Wrap-up
Hiding inside a classroom from someone who most likely is a current or former student who knows the lockdown plan doesn’t make sense. Hiding inside an classroom for hours when there was a fight and the shooter fled also don’t make sense.
As we near 25 years after Columbine in April 2024, the entire school security enterprise needs to be re-evaluated. If locking down schools was working, there wouldn’t be more shootings with more injuries and fatalities than there were before “Columbine changed everything”.
Instead of asserting that an idea is the best solution, we must follow the data to find the root causes and implement meaningful changes.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. If you liked this, listen to my recent interview on Freakonomics Radio.