Education Week - May 22, 2013 - 16

EDUCATION WEEK

MAY 22, 2013

www.edweek.org

FOCUS ON: EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS

Shooter Simulations Join List of Must-Do Safety Drills
Sheriff’s deputy
Chad Rogers,
center, advances
with fellow officers
during a full-scale
“active shooter”
exercise this spring
at Elmira High
School in Elmira,
Ore. An increasing
number of states
are enacting or
considering laws
to require schools
to practice safety
drills that involve
multiple agencies
and volunteer
students and
school staff.

ington state schools, plus an additional drill of schools’ choice.
Proposals whose fates were undecided as of last week include a
Missouri bill that would require
all school personnel to participate
in simulated active-shooter and
intruder-response drills conducted
by law enforcement.
A Louisiana bill still being considered would require principals
to review their crisis-management
plans and response every year, and
consider the thoughts of students,
parents, teachers, other school employees, community leaders, and
public safety officials.
An Illinois bill that Democratic
Gov. Pat Quinn has indicated he
would support would require shooting drills at all schools.
Whether the additional practice and paperwork will actually
improve schools’ defenses against
shooters and intruders is hard to
say, said Ronald D. Stephens, the
executive director of the National
School Safety Center, an advocacy
and advisory group in Westlake
Village, Calif.
“How do you plan for things that
nobody has ever thought of before?”
said Mr. Stephens, noting that some
recent school shootings were unprecedented in scope and approach.
“It’s hard to think of everything.”
In Newtown, the gunman shot
his way into the school, then
killed 20 1st graders and six staff
members.
Mr. Stephens said that as new
safety measures are adopted, he
wonders how schools will have the
expertise to carry them out, or the
resources to acquire that capacity.

Footing the Bill
Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe, a
Democrat, signed a bill into law in
March that requires annual activeshooter drills at schools starting
next fall. The bill assumes there
will be money given to the University of Arkansas’ Criminal Justice
Institute, in Little Rock, to train
schools in what those drills should
entail. The money hasn’t been put
in the budget yet, but the requirement remains.
State Sen. Missy Irvin, a Republican and the bill’s sponsor, said she
hasn’t given up on the money coming through, but even without it,
she wants schools to figure out the
drills on their own.
“There’s no reason in the world
we should not be practicing these
types of drills,” Sen. Irvin said. “Unfortunately, that’s the reality of our
world that we live in today.”
She said she proposed the law because her own children, ages 12, 14,
16, and 18, told her after the Newtown shootings that they wouldn’t
know what to do in such a situation.
“A long time ago, we legislated
that you have fire drills and tornado drills,” Sen. Irvin said, so it’s
natural that school safety preparation now include practice for a more
recent type of potential crisis, too.

Brian Davies/The Register-Guard/AP

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

MULTIMEDIA: For an interactive, state-by-state look at school safety

measures, go to www.edweek.org/go/safetybills

But Mr. Stephens added a note of
caution to schools’ rush to drill.
“When you get into one specific
type of crisis, it could become another,” he said. A shooting might
prompt teachers to lock their classroom doors and hunker down with
students, but everyone in those
classrooms could become easy targets if a gunman moved from class-

“

We spend
too much time
trying to identify
every possible
crisis that
occurs. No two
crises are alike.”
RICK J. KAUFMAN
Bloomington Public Schools

room to classroom, he said.
“It’s difficult to have a one-sizefits-all” drill, Mr. Stephens said.
Even when there is practice, it
may become irrelevant, said Richard Abernathy, the executive director of the Arkansas Association
of Educational Administrators.
Mr. Abernathy said that when he
was the principal at Lavaca High
School in the western part of the
state, a radio station incorrectly
told listeners the school had been
hit by a tornado. A windstorm had
blown paneling off the school, and
the scene outside was nasty, but
students continued classes uninterrupted.
Parents flocked to the school,

however, clamoring to take their
children home.
“It would have taken the National Guard ... to have an orderly
process to check out” students, Mr.
Abernathy said. “Parents beat any
emergency vehicle to the school.”
The school’s emergency planning
and drills became moot.
“You just threw it all out the
door,” Mr. Abernathy said.

Making Time
Virginia already required
more than a dozen safety drills
throughout the school year before
the Newtown killings occurred,
said Steven R. Staples, the executive director of the Virginia
Association of School Superintendents, in Richmond. The state
created a task force to evaluate
school safety after the attack.
“I said to the task force, many
people woke up the day after
Sandy Hook worrying about school
safety. Superintendents worry
about school safety every day,” Mr.
Staples said.
While he said his organization is
open to considering nearly any proposal to boost students’ safety, state
leaders must consider that the new
requirements come at a cost, which
may not be just financial.
“You just can’t keep adding one
more item to the hopper without
one more thing getting displaced,”
he said. His group would have preferred replacing two fire drills with
the new intruder drills.
Virginia schools must conduct
four fire drills in the first month of
school and one every month for the
rest of the year.
One drill might take 45 minutes.
And teachers have to spend additional time settling students back

into the groove of class, Mr. Staples
said. If the drill is done when students aren’t present, teachers lose
preparation time. Schools also must
complete written safety plans and
audits, he said.
“At some point, it may become too
much,” he said. “We haven’t added
time to our day, days to our year.”
In Oklahoma, Gov. Mary Fallin,
a Republican, signed bills into law
in April that will require schools to
practice two drills each for intruders, fires, and tornados and two
drills of schools’ choosing, in addition to two lockdown drills already
required.
Another new Oklahoma law requires school safety plans to be
shared with local emergency-response agencies by Nov. 1 each year.
If schools don’t conduct the right
number of drills, it can affect accreditation, said Tricia Pemberton,
a spokeswoman for the state department of education.
Joseph Siano, the president
of the Oklahoma Association of
School Administrators, said it’s
worth interrupting classes for a
lifesaving drill.
“I don’t think there’s a better reason than to practice for that one
incident that you hope never happens,” said Mr. Siano, the superintendent of the 15,500-student Norman district.
But a recent newspaper investigation in Michigan found schools
don’t always follow strong safety
laws just because states have them.
The discovery could lead to even
more legislation in the state.

Spotty Compliance
The MLive newspaper group
checked in on how 400 schools—
including some run by charter

companies and private organizations—in 100 Michigan districts
were complying with state laws
about emergency drills. It found
that an average of two out of
three districts and privately run
schools had one or more shortcomings, such as skipped practice sessions, drills done less frequently
than state law requires or very
close to the end of the school year,
or incomplete or missing records.
One school did eight required
drills in one day.
This month, a state lawmaker
said in response to the report he
may propose that records of school
safety efforts be posted online to
hold schools accountable.
Rick J. Kaufman, the executive
director of community relations
and emergency management for
the 10,000-student Bloomington
school district in Minnesota, said
legislators’ best intentions of
improving school safety may be
misguided.
Before working in Bloomington,
he was the spokesman for the Jefferson County, Colo., school district,
where two students killed classmates and themselves in 1999 at
Columbine High School.
“We spend too much time trying
to identify every possible crisis that
occurs. No two crises are alike,” Mr.
Kaufman said.
He said staff members may get
little or no information, or incomplete information, from school administrators in the event of a real
crisis. He echoed Mr. Stephens, of
the National School Safety Center,
on the need to train teachers and
other staff members in getting
students to comply with their commands in any situation
“It’s more important that we drill
and train staff what to do with any
incident,” he said. “What are the
one, two, three, maybe four steps
you’re going to need to do? You have
to be adaptable.”

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Education Week - May 22, 2013

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