Sacrificing Student Mental Health
An Open Letter Policy Memo to Colorado Schools
Given that school districts across both the nation and state of Colorado are employing a variety of tactics in response to an increase in school gun violence, this report is designed to explore the need for more research on active shooter drill procedures and suggest temporary alternatives until conclusions can be drawn on their outcomes in a trauma-informed manner. Originally, this report aimed to provide information related to the long-term mental health effects of active shooter drills currently being used in both primary and secondary schools nationwide. This would have been in an effort to support trauma-informed decision making of district safety officers while determining best practices related to active shooter and other lockdown drills. Unfortunately, the availability of peer reviewed, or otherwise scholarly information related to the long-term effects of drills themselves, is severely lacking.
This report covers the following:
1. A brief background of trauma development in the body, specifically that of children, with a focus on how active shooter drills may illicit trauma responses over time.
2. The current state of active shooter drills across the nation including how they are materialized in a school setting with an emphasis on how some may pose an increased risk of psychological damage to students than others. This section will include a brief discussion regarding the economic concerns regarding third-party drill teams.
3. Future directions promoting more thorough academic study of active shooter drills and their outcomes that more effectively protect psychological health while not decreasing student and staff physical safety.
This topic is complex and dynamic. This report in no way claims that all active shooter events are the same although there are striking similarities across all, which provides the foundation to claim research and active policymaking in particular areas that appear consistent. While much of the data in this report is based on national data, the aim is to apply these principals to Colorado school districts specifically due to our unique experiences with school shootings.
INTRODUCTION
The uniqueness of Colorado as a hub for understanding and responding to school shootings cannot be understated. There were 25 school shootings in Colorado between 1999 and 2013 and there have been 235 school shootings nationwide since 2014. The Columbine massacre in 1999 began an era of school shootings across the country despite there being four other major school shootings in the nation since the 1980’s due to its high death count and intense media coverage, which was recently made possible at the turn of the century. This massacre pinned the state of Colorado as a high-risk state as evidenced recently by an armed 18-year-old woman traveling to Colorado from Florida, which shut down over twenty schools across sixteen districts. While it is unfair to claim any master plan on behalf of the young woman, her public fascination with Columbine, attire matching that of the original assailants, and ease of legal firearm attainment, which included multiple rounds of ammunition, was cause for concern and opened the wounds of many families and that of the entire state. Levels of anxiety and panic rose over the course of two days as the 20th anniversary of Columbine approached while local and federal authorities searched for her. The panic that the entire state of Colorado experienced during this time indicates a need for more organized and compassionate responses to such events and elevates a need from residents to know their children are safe.
This is just one example of how the ripples of school shootings affect not only a single state where the offense takes place, but our entire nation. As a result, states are attempting to be proactive and prepare students and staff to respond to active shooter situations by holding lockdown drills, acting out active shooter situations, and teaching children how to barricade doors and arm themselves. Concerns begin to arise when these active shooter drills become too arousing for young children and repeated exposure to these situations, such as with drills that occur each school year, expose a young mind to what feels like a threatening situation despite there being no authenitic threat in the moment.
PART (I)
TRAUMA AND CHILDREN
(a) HOW TRAUMA WORKS IN THE BRAIN AND BODY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
In response to stress, the body increases cortisol levels and adrenaline in order to prepare itself for one of three functions; fight, flight or freeze. Over long periods of time, the body’s hedonic setpoint to these hormones narrows and the biological response to stress becomes more easily elicited. This results in increased stress responses such as anxiety, being easily startled, and a plethora of physical symptomology including gastrointestinal distress, difficulty sleeping, and increased cortisol secretion. It is in this way that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) develops over long periods of time, with repeated exposure to smaller stressful events, and with more frequency. This is in comparison to the more traditionally understood development of PTSD as occurring after a dramatic isolated incident. The body stores these smaller experiences as memories not within the hippocampus, but in the somatosensory processing area of the brain where external stimuli are processed as threatening, outside the prefrontal cortex, and produces a trauma response as opposed to a more mitigated startle response that one can then process and overcome in the moment. In short, consistent small exposures to stressful situations change the way the body operates on a day to day basis leading to the development of PTSD symptoms even in the absence of a largely traumatic event.
Children are at particular risk for the development of PTSD symptomology because of their developmental stage. The brain is more acutely responds to hormone secretions in an effort to develop a hedonic setpoint, or the body’s ability to determine whether it is in homeostasis or outside its window of tolerance. If a young brain is releasing excess amounts of adrenaline and cortisol indicating the body is in a constant state of stress, the brain and body of the child will develop to expect stress throughout their lives. This is why children who grow up in chaotic households often report having trauma and anxiety as adults. Children’s brains and bodies do not have the complex prefrontal-cortex function that adults have and as a result find it more difficult to distinguish between genuine threat and perceived threat. This is why trauma-informed care is so vital to consider in educational settings when children’s minds are stimulated and primed to develop and create memory imprints both within and outside of the hippocampus.
(b) HOW ACTIVE SHOOTER DRILLS POSE A THREAT TO CHILD MENTAL HEALTH
Over the course of a child’s academic career in America ranging from Pre-K-12th grade, a single child will encounter at minimum of 52 active shooter, lockdown, and lockout drills. When schools are shut down for potential threats, children are cognitively exposed to the possibility that school is not safe and then do not feel protected such as in April of 2019. Knowing what we know about hormonal responses to stress and the possible outcomes it poses to young people, it is hard to claim that school shooting drills do not pose a risk the children over the long term. Simply, it is a lot for a young mind and body to handle. The compounding stress of learning while also focusing on physical safety produces a highly-stressful environment that can cause long lasting psychological damage to children. We are seeing a rise in adolescent depression and anxiety never seen before and much of it has to do with the high demands of school combined with feeling a lack of safety. This report claims that procedures done in response to school shooting events can be adjusted to counteract some of these directions in student mental health while others may only compound these effects.
PART (II)
CURRENT RESPONSES IN THE ERA OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS
(a) WHAT SCHOOL SHOOTER DRILLS LOOK AND FEEL LIKE
With much of the discourse surrounding school violence being politicized, many districts find themselves hiring third-party companies to enact active shooter drills to make their students and staff feel safe as the gears of government turn slowly. Unfortunately, many of these drills use language and props that feel real for children or otherwise expose students to disturbing imagery that put the child in a high state of arousal due to the physical presence of the image as opposed to seeing it printed or otherwise removed from the immediate physical environement. Over time, these drills may produce the negative mental health effects discussed in Part (I). While some schools maintain more traditional methods of safety drills such as lockdown drills, many are finding themselves in need of more intensive response tactics as demands for change and action mount in their respective communities.
In more intensive training drills, third party teams come into schools in full tactical gear and fake weaponry. Some include posing fake victims scattered in hallways surrounded by pools of blood. The tactical team then roams the halls, yelling, and banging on doors trying to open them. Additionally, in more realistic drills, some staff are actually shot with pellet guns, which affects the mental health of teachers who now know in an active shooter situation, they would most likely die. Students attend an assembly in which they are told to barricade doors in militarized, orderly fashion and quickly grab a school item to defend themselves should they encounter an attacker. They are also taught that in the event of encounter, they should throw items at the assailant so other students, not themselves, may have time to get away. In some extreme cases and with older adolescents and college ages students, trainers advise that if cornered, students should make themselves as “unattractive” to the assailant by defecating themselves. From very young children to young adults, an entire generation is being taught how to defend themselves in what otherwise feels like a hopeless situation with fear constantly at the doorstep.
Imagine you are a small child in a fourth-grade classroom during one of these drills and for some reason your classmates do not barricade the door well enough or the lock doesn’t work. The tactical team comes down the hall and is able to force themselves into your classroom; how would you ever feel safe in that classroom again? Perhaps consider how you would feel if you were being escorted out of the school as part of a drill and were exposed to a fake victim, looking entirely real. Possibly worse, if you were a student planning a shooting and saw it come to life heightening your desire to commit the violent act with knowledge of how the school will respond and thus adjusting your plan to be more successful.While neither of these examples have sufficient empirical evidence to support their validity, they surely should be explored for verification. The consistent biological response to such intense situations and exposure to violence, real or perceived, is difficult to parse out as a young person and may lead to heightened arousal and long-term effects each time you encounter the environment in which you experience such consistent exposure. For children, this is the same environment they spend roughly a third of their lives until they are 18.
(b) ECONOMICAL ETHICS CONCERNS OF ACTIVE SHOOTER DRILLS
While students are being exposed to these high-stress events, districts are shelling out upwards of $450 and possibly as much as $3,600 for active shooter drills through third party companies. While the commodification of fear following Columbine is not new, there is something innately eerie about schools having to pay such fees from their own district budgets to feel safe for a program that may be doing peripheral forms of psychological damage. This concern is enhanced when one understands how state budgets for K-12 schools have decreased over time.
Some states are torn on whether students should participate in more intensive drilling programs or the school should be more heavily armed. Both are expensive and create the tension and perception that danger is immediate to students. Some staff, students, and family feel safer with armed teachers and school security personal while others do not feel any safer. Additionally, many staff members do not wish to be armed because they do not want the psychological stress of always feeling on guard and determining whether they have a specific-enough constitution to put their lives on the line for others or shoot a possible student if the time came. In either case of having armed or unarmed teachers, the need for active shooter drills is necessary to prepare the school to respond in an organized fashion instead of relying on a few number of teachers to respond. There are certainly programs that stand to profit from the fear surrounding schools in our current political and social climate. It is deplorable to make access to safety a monetary concern for children and civil servants.
PART (III)
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
(a) THE NEED FOR RESEARCH AND POSSIBLE TEMPORARY SOLUTIONS
Until we are able to conclude definitively what the effects of consistent active shooter drills are, it is important to be mindful of the environment we are creating for children. It is concerning that students are being exposed to such stressful situations beginning at a young age without complete understanding of the possible psychological outcomes. The instinct to protect students is warranted, however, we owe it to children in our care to be responsible in our efforts to help as well. The first step is understanding the outcomes different forms of drills have on the mental health of students including real-time biological feedback to understand whether there is an increased stress or fear response that could lead to PTSD symptomology over time. This can be accomplished via controlled, academic studies through psychology, education, and biology/physiology departments and should be funded at a federal level.
Second, children should be prepared in a manner that is as psychologically safe as possible. This may include enacting drills on days when children are not present. While students receive an edited and more developmentally-appropriate drill, staff members may have days in which they engage in more intensive drilling where they are permitted to ask questions and raise concerns among fellow adults without having the need to censor themselves out fear of frightening their students. An important piece to this model would be completely redesigning the way these drills are demonstrated and presented to children. Many videos showing active shooter drills are riddled with language inappropriate for child consumption. While many teachers, staff, and training teams may not notice that their language is affecting how the child may be receiving a message, we know that language shapes perception in children. Part of developing more developmentally-friendly programs will have to include extremely intentional language development for a variety of audiences, age groups, and scenarios.
Finally, should third party companies be allowed to continue providing active shooter training, they should be heavily vetted. Having a history of combat does not automatically qualify you and your company to train civilians and children. There should be regulations and qualifications for such companies approved by a diverse federal board that is then revised by state districts, so the final product is representative of the needs of as many individual schools as possible. These companies should have a limit on how much they can charge for their service or otherwise be paid for out of the federal education budget until federal and state firearm regulations are changed in a manner that proves a decrease in school shooting violence.
