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." Miller says the kindergartners are spared from more detailed talk that might disturb them. “We're not going to talk about people dying and active shooters and those types of things," he said."It's a danger. And we need to all be on the same page and acting as a team so that we can keep each other safe."
Mass shootings on the riseThe active shooter trend appears to be on the rise nationwide, according to FBI data, and six in 10 people are worried about a mass shooting in their community, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll. But a lower percentage -- about two-thirds -- conducted active shooter drills per the GAO. As of the March 2016 report, nine states required districts to conduct active shooter drills.
James Alan Fox, The Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law and Public Policy at Northeastern University said that while he supports students talking through active shooter scenarios, drills are"overboard." As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes and critics often cite, school shootings are exceedingly rare with school-associated homicides"consistently" accounting for less than 2% of youth homicides, according to a study of incidents from 1994-2018. Of the school-associated homicides during that period, 90 percent only involved one victim, the CDC said in its report.