By Emily Greene-Colozzi, UMass Lowell
School shooting preparedness drills have been a routine though uncomfortable part of the back-to-school experience. Since the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, various kinds of preparedness drills have been mandatory in most schools.
As schools schedule and conduct these preparedness exercises, parents are likely to hear grim terms like “active shooter drill” and “lockdown drill.”
For most schools, these drills are not optional. As of 2025, 37 out of 50 states require schools to conduct active shooter or lockdown drills at least once per year. Some states, like New York, require schools to conduct lockdown drills at various points throughout the year. Texas, meanwhile, requires lockdowns and shelter-in-place drills, but it also permits active shooter threat exercises, including shooter simulations.
The nationwide controversy over school shooter preparedness drills tends to conflate hyperrealistic simulations – with fake blood and bullets – with lockdown procedures, which might involve turning off the lights and having children remain quiet.
While research is mixed on the effectiveness of both kinds of school shooter preparedness exercises, the two practices look and feel very different.
Understanding lockdown drills
A lockdown drill typically involves three simple elements: locks, lights and moving out of sight.
Teachers and students learn to lock their classroom doors, shut off the lights and move to a safe area without sight lines until an all-clear notification from a school official or police.
Carrying out this routine can build familiarity and muscle memory that encourage a rapid and calm response in the event of an actual emergency.
Lockdowns may be initiated for any number of reasons, not necessarily related to an active shooter. A student once told me that the single lockdown she experienced in elementary school was in response to a squirrel that had invaded the building.
Other schools have been forced to implement lockdowns for graver threats: parent disputes that become physical, nearby police activity, wildlife, or, in the worst-case scenario, an armed assailant.
A more intense kind of drill
Active shooter simulation drills, meanwhile, are specific to armed assailants. These drills may involve actors posing as shooters, as well as mock gunfire, fake blood, and even the use of nonlethal projectiles, such as BB guns or paintball guns.
Among surveyed K-12 teachers, 55% reported that the active shooter drills practiced in their schools did not include sensory elements such as fake blood. Yet around 6% of teachers had experienced drills with simulated gunfire, and 1% reported fake blood or explosions.
High-intensity simulations are restricted in some states, including New York and California. Other states may explicitly differentiate between active shooter simulations and lockdown drills. Many states have no guidelines at all related to simulations in schools.
Still, research shows there are significant concerns about the psychological harm these simulations can have on students and teachers. Importantly, there are no existing studies that test whether they improve outcomes in real-world active shooter scenarios, because the baseline rate of these attacks is so low.
Yet these drills tend to generate the most media attention and public outcry. Moreover, they are conflated with lockdown drills, leading to parents hearing about lockdown practices and drawing parallels to terrifying simulations with pretend shooters and gunfire.
Different exercises confused as one
When federal sources report that 95% of U.S. schools implement lockdown drills, this mostly refers to locks, lights and out-of-sight practice – not simulations and armed assailant drills.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine cited this 2023 statistic in an influential report on the mental and emotional risks of active shooter drills, but ambiguously presented that “95%” as reflecting “active shooter drills,” not lockdowns.
Unsurprisingly, this report found mixed results on the impact of active shooter drills. The report also revealed a lack of standardization across schools for drills and preparedness in general. This has made it nearly impossible to understand what’s harmful, what’s helpful, and what should be common practice.
Whether lockdowns work
Professional organizations warn that high-intensity active shooter simulation drills may cause trauma for students, without making them more prepared for such a terrifying, real-life situation. But academic studies have found some support for lockdowns.
For example, middle and high school-aged students in a large, urban central New York school district reported lower fear and better preparedness after participating in lockdown drills with the locks, lights, out-of-sight approach. Other studies assessing various exercises, ranging from lockdowns to active shooter simulations, report mixed and negative impacts on fear and anxiety.
This indicates a fundamental problem with how we study preparedness drills: The research itself lacks the nuance required to establish clear harm or benefit to practicing for an active shooter situation.
Observational studies suggest that lockdowns can impede shooters’ movement through space, potentially mitigating harm. Research from Texas State University has found that unsecured doors were associated with more victims during active shooter incidents at schools. A separate study suggested that lockdowns are associated with fewer casualties during mass school shootings.
Learning preparedness, without trauma
At the start of the 2026-27 school year, a parent posting on the subreddit “Daddit” shared a story about his preschool-aged child practicing staying quiet so “the bad guy” wouldn’t hear her.
This kind of scenario is simply not needed, research shows. As children age into middle and high school, lockdown practice is paired with the rationale for the drill, incorporating more sophisticated discussions about school safety, violence prevention and response, and emergency preparedness.
In early childhood and beginning elementary school, the routine can be learned without the rationale or explanation. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that adults running these drills use neutral phrases like “lockdown” or “safety drill,” instead of a more frightening term like “active shooter drill.”
Some schools follow this guidance, but others may not. My preschooler has informed me of “quiet times” when he and his classmates sit in a corner and learn to stay quiet. When gently prodded for more explanation, he has no other reasoning for the behavior except that it’s a time to be still and quiet.
There is cautious consensus among experts that some kind of intruder preparedness is necessary. When conducted with the procedural simplicity of fire drills, lockdowns may be the least traumatic and most effective drills. Just as fire drills rarely simulate actual fires, lockdown drills need not introduce harmful or deceptive scenarios that explicitly recreate an emergency.
But with a lack of standardized practice, guidelines and terminology, disentangling the distinct outcomes and effects of lockdowns from the consequences of ambiguously defined “active shooter drills” is an uphill battle.
Emily Greene-Colozzi, Assistant Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, UMass Lowell
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
I carried a Beretta 21A in 22LR the entire time I was a college student. Including teaching in elementary schools. I’m glad I never had to use it. But I trained and practiced with it. Shooting out to 25 yards.
It’s unfortunate that our society has allowed sick mentally ill adults, and sick mentally ill children, to openly travel everywhere they want to go.
The champagne libertarians liberals and leftists, who support this policy. Either don’t have children. Or if the do, their kids go to an expensive private school.
Almost all of these attacks at schools, have been at a public one.
It is immoral to allow the mentally ill to harm themselves and other people.
“You can’t force them into treatment.”
Really???
But you can force the population to wear a mask. You can force a business to close. But allow others to stay open.
Anything to keep from having a strong armed credible deterrent [and if necessary a strong stopping response] in schools on scene already so the kids will not need to worry about it. The main flaw in both the ‘active shooter’ drill thing is relying on police as a deterrent. Now its ‘compensating’ by ‘think of the children’s emotions’ instead of simply imbuing a sense of security and actually stopping the threat for the kids. When you tell little kids ‘we need to hide and be quiet’ suddenly in a school they know something is wrong, they can sense it even if they may not be able to understand or define it in their minds – but they trust adults to stop what ever it is and protect them before it can get them. In other words no matter how you phrase it with neutral phrases or not little kids already know and can sense something bad.
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
― G.K. Chesterton”
Or to rephrase that for ‘active shooter’ context…
“Children already know that monsters exist. What they need to know is that monsters can be killed.”
And that is what gives them the sense of security and calms the emotional impact – that they can triumph over the monsters and they are going to be safe by the monster being vanquished. Little kids want heroes to save them from the monsters by vanquishing the monster, they need to know that’s going to happen that a hero is gonna save them when that monster comes face to face. ‘lets hide and be quiet’ no matter how its phrased does not do that – little kids want strength to protect and defend them, heros, not words and waiting. If they were at home, a sane and responsible and loving parent would be their hero and give their lives if necessary to defend their kids from a monster breaking in and sure that might be a ‘hide and be quiet’ thing but the kids trust their parent is going to do their best to vanquish that monster if it comes upon them. But in schools they do not have that, they have ‘lets hide and be quiet’ and that leaves them hanging for the ‘what if it does not work then who is gonna vanquish the monster?’ question in their minds even if they can’t understand that question exists in that form for them. There is a reason little kids in these situations cry out for ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’ and not ‘teacher’ when the stress is on, they know a teacher is likely to not act to vanquish that monster when it shows up and they want mom and dad to be their hero’s and vanquish the monster. Parents send their kids to school and entrust them to people who are gonna give excuses as to why their kids were not protected if that monster does show up – but notice the reasons given in news conferences when it does happen “We followed our procedures and went into lock down.” – when it should be ‘We responded and stopped the killer quickly’ just like it would be attempted for the kids at home with armed strong and sane and loving and protective mom & dad.
What happens when a lockdown procedure fails and the monster comes face to face with its prey? Which one of these would explain the outcome better and save lives …”We followed our procedures and went into lock down.” or ‘We responded and stopped the killer quickly.’ ?
Police response after the fact [of incident beginning and continuing] is not a deterrent or preventive or stopping measure, its permission for the bad guy to act to dominate a target zone for at least 3 minutes or more when most casualties happen in less than 3 minutes and with most of those happening in 30 seconds to a minute.
You want to ease these little minds? Words are not going to do it. To ease these little minds they need to know that hero’s are right there to save them then in the imminent. Arm teachers & school staff and actually give that sense of security to these kids that the monster can be vanquished when they need it to happen then.
Parents, you need to demand that schools give the same imminent deadly threat defensive protection that you would be willing to give at home – that teachers and school staff be willing to put their own lives on the line to protect and defend your children against that imminent monster when it shows up and the kids need to know that is gonna happen.
Arm teachers & staff – they are the only ones close enough or on scene when that imminent monster happens – you have seconds at most, and when seconds count the police are still minutes away.
.40 cal Booger,
Your comment is spot-on … and many people don’t want to hear or know the truth in your statements. And even if those types of people bother to hear or know the truth in your statements, they go into full-blown denial about truly effective safety / security.
Then we have people who are willing to sacrifice as many people as it takes to facilitate a populace that is unarmed and feeble–and facilitate a leviathan government. The currently dominant conventional “wisdom” helps exactly that.
“Bad guy” is sexist.
“person of less than honorable intentions”? 😏
This article was a waste of time.
A) Actual shootings in a school are so uncommon that we can’t gather useful statistics.
B) The statistics tell us maybe mass shooter drills and lockdown drills work, or maybe they don’t.
C) Someone knew someone that knew someone that may have been traumatized by a drill. (OK, some hyperbole.)
Way back, when my younger child was in elementary school, they did lockdown drills—shut the lights and huddle in the corner. He came home and told me how pointless it was. Anyone who had been to the school would know right where to find people.
No mention of ALICE training, which presents a multiple action(s) approach to a not-good event, not just an assailant. I took the training and found it enlightening.