'There's never a safe place': Colorado school training kindergartners to high schoolers to respond to an active shooter.
She believes in superheroes, but she also wonders about “a bad guy coming” to her school.In a classroom filled with smiling and giggling children, art work on the walls and brightly colored chairs, a new reality unfolded recently for Amelia and the kindergarteners of Pinnacle Charter School outside Denver -- a drill to help them deal with the specter of an active shooter.
Active shooter drills are a growing and controversial part of the education system in the United States with an estimated 67 percent of districts conducting active shooter exercises, according to the United States Government Accountability Office . While many say the drills are necessary to confront the reality of the mass shooter era, others question their effectiveness and say that they stoke fear and create the potential for psychological damage unnecessarily.
"Shootings scare me the most 'cause school is where I'm at, like, 24/7," Joshua said."So it's like, what if that were to happen at our school? But that's why we're doing this training so we know and can prepare ourselves." "We start with a very open discussion," Joe Deedon, a former sheriff's deputy and SWAT team member who founded TAC*ONE, told ABC News."We let them lead the conversation and it blows parents' minds, it blows teachers' minds... how much they truly know about the topic, even though we try to shelter them."
"It makes me angry that I always have to think about this," Joshua said,"because every time I hear the [intercom] announcements [in class] it's like, 'What is it gonna say?' My stomach has a weird feeling 'cause you never know." About 95 percent of schools had lockdown drills in the 2015-16 school year and 92 percent had written shooting or active shooter plans in place, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
A 2015 paper in the Children's Legal Rights Journal notes that legislation prescribing drills is"vague" and that"this discretion has led to a number of problems with heightened simulations that are often terrifying to the students, especially when those simulation drills are carried out without any advance notice from the school district."
But he does support drills for teachers. He made the comparison to airlines -- when passengers get on a plane many don’t pay attention to the flight attendant’s safety announcement. “We all assume that the crew has been trained and if something bad happens they will get on the PA and they’ll tell us what to do,” he said.
Miller, Pinnacle Charter School's CEO, said after the STEM shooting he knew it was time for a change in preparedness. Kids regularly practice fire and tornado drills, Miller said, yet he feels an active shooter may be a more likely threat in schools today. "Whatever they do within the 15, 20 seconds of an event is gonna be extremely critical," Deedon said.
“We have been discussing how when bad things happen, that it doesn’t happen to everybody,” said Samantha Davis, Amelia Guana's mom. “I don’t like having to have them go through it, but with the world now I’d rather them learn at this age, ‘cause as they get older it’ll be easier for them." Meanwhile, older students were taught how to barricade themselves in classrooms and how to fight back.
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