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And the researcher who told me we should not do drills in school, period. I keep thinking about this one shooting, the Red Lake Indian Reservation shooting, and how in that one, a classroom of students did a traditional lockdown, squat and hide, because they practiced it, and how an investigator on that case told me that drill did not help them at all. But when I asked her what the drill was for, she said, I don't know exactly. Last year, she did a traditional lockdown at her school, squat and hide. Reporting on this for several months, I knew what I was looking for, something concrete to tell my daughter's school. Though if Ashley had done it, if she'd followed the protocol, locked and barricaded her door right away, it would've been way harder to pull all those kids into her room from the hallway. One thing that was part of the training at Douglas was barricading your door, basically pushing lots of furniture up against your classroom door. But she did talk to me more generally about some of things I knew they'd done at Douglas, like papering over windows. There's no one single way, no agreement on what's best.Ĭheryl Jonson didn't want to get into the specifics of what happened at Douglas, partly because it's still too soon. ALICE has its own way of doing things, just like the other big outfit, Safe Havens International, has its own way of doing things.

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I really wanted to find some expert to weigh in on Douglas, to tell me, did the teachers' training help? Did more kids survive because of it? What might have worked better?Ĭheryl Jonson researches what's effective in these drills at Xavier University and is a training instructor for ALICE, one of two big companies in the US that train schools how to respond to active shooters. Gauze actually has saved lives in mass shootings. Melissa, for instance, wanted trauma kits with gauze in every classroom and training on how to treat bullet wounds with it. But they also both had ideas coming out of this, about ways they could have been better prepared. But now, Melissa and Ashley have been in that rare situation, the one that's hard to study.Īnd they both told me that having a playbook for what to do helped. School shootings, for how much we think and talk about them, are still statistically rare. There's very little evidence about whether school shooting drills of any kind actually work. He's one of the 17 who died that day, standing in his doorway. Scott Beigel in the room next to Stacey's did the same thing Stacey did, waited a little with the door open. Stacey is the teacher whose arm was grazed. Ashley told her students that's what they should expect. If you know one is coming and you hear shots, how can you tell if it's a drill or the real thing? At Douglas, Ashley and Melissa both thought this was the kind of drill they'd have, unannounced with a fake shooter firing blanks. Some find the blanks so upsetting they can't even finish the simulations.Īnd there's a more basic problem with these surprise drills. They forget crucial steps, like calling the police, and commit more dangerous mistakes. One guy who trains teachers using video simulations told me that teachers who've been through one of these surprise drills perform worse on his simulations than teachers who have no training at all. None of them thought they're a good idea. I talked to several school safety experts about these drills with blanks, these surprise drills that are hyperrealistic. In one, a teacher claims she got PTSD after a man in a black hoodie came into her class, pointed a gun to her face, fired, and said, you're dead. There have even been lawsuits about them.

But surprise drills with blanks are controversial. Surprise drills with blanks, while not the norm, appeal to some schools who say there are benefits to learning how you'll act under pressure.