Schools engaging in security theater rather than giving teachers and school personnel the means to defend students against an attacker if the worst actually happens . . .
Then there’s the question of why we subject the kids to these drills at all. Despite the wall-to-wall hysteria over school shootings, it is extremely unlikely for any student to experience such an event.
A Washington Post column last year by David Ropeik, author of “How Risky Is It, Really?,” highlighted the rarity of a school shooting. Ropeik writes: “The statistical likelihood of any given public-school student being killed by a gun, in school, on any given day since 1999 was roughly 1 in 614,000,000. And since the 1990s, shootings at schools have been getting less common.”
Meanwhile, according to National Geographic, “the odds of becoming a lightning victim in the US in any one year is 1 in 700,000. The odds of being struck in your lifetime is 1 in 3,000.” And according to the National Safety Council, your chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident is 1 in 103.
We don’t have our kids practice car accidents or what to do if struck by lightning, because we know that preparing for these unlikely events is impossible, and scaring our children over the possibility would outweigh any benefit the preparation might offer. Yet in schools, we have decided that terrifying our kids is OK.
Carol Markowicz in School shooter drills terrorize our kids pointlessly