For American children, innocence is the first casualty in mass shootings
Preparing for attack is the 'new normal' for kids, but experts warn adults should avoid adding to anxiety
Stephanie Boyd's school-aged sons knew just what to do last Wednesday when the family emerged from watching the latest Goosebumps flick to discover the cinema they were in was on lockdown.
Boyd and her children had no way of knowing that only about 1,500 feet from the AMC Stonybrook 20 theaters in Jeffersontown, a woman lay shot dead in the Kroger parking lot and police were chasing the suspected shooter.
But her sons, who had practiced lockdown and active shooter drills in school, were prepared.
Cole, her 11-year-old, counseled his mother as 9-year-old brother Vance began crawling on his belly.
"Mom, we stay low to the ground," Cole said. "We find a place with a door we can lock. Then we go in and we lock it."
Public mass shootings, while statistically rare in the United States, have indelibly changed Americans' psyches. And they have meant a newer ritual for younger Americans: drills to prepare in the event of an active shooter.
Federal data from the 2013-14 school year show 70 percent of public schools in the U.S. held drills to prepare students to react to shootings.
In some ways, the active shooter drills are reminiscent of Cold War-era duck-and-cover exercises designed to prepare children for nuclear attack.
It's the new normal, experts and educators say.
"These are drills we all do every day in our lives. We’re just adding one more drill to that list," said Alex Piquero, a professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Piquero compared lockdown or active shooter drills to the safety demonstrations given by airline attendants before every flight — it's unlikely people will need the information, but it's good to have if the worst happens.
"It's unfortunate, obviously, but it's part of our lives," he said.
The idea of active shooter drills may feel jarring to those who did not grow up doing them, he said, but that's because "we didn't have school shooters back when I was a kid."
But some lament the drills are now ubiquitous and worry they could upset students' sense of well-being if over-emphasized.
Charlotte Manno, director of the Early Childhood Lab at the University of Kentucky, said she thinks schools should do basic fire, tornado and other drills and use them to teach skills for other emergencies.
"Labeling drills — or telling children a bad guy is in the school, or someone is trying to kill us or shoot us — can be scary for children and cause stress and anxiety," Manno said.
She said children in middle school and older may be more aware, but such drills can still be unnerving.
"Childhood should be carefree and not full of worry," she said.
A third of children worry about a shooting at their school, according to a survey released earlier this year by Children's Defense Fund, an advocacy group. That's more than the share of students who say they worry about not fitting in with their peers, according to that study.
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While the number of public mass shootings differs depending on the definition and data used, the Washington Post detailed 157 shootings in the U.S. since 1966 in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter, or in some cases, two shooters.
Concerns about mass shootings, particularly at schools, has caused some lawmakers and others to call for increased security measures at schools, including some controversial ideas like arming teachers.
For instance, shortly after the school shooting at Marshall County High in Benton, Kentucky, that left two dead, Pike County, Kentucky, passed a resolution to arm teachers and staff but later scrapped the preliminary plan in favor of uniformed deputies patrolling schools.
A report from the Education Commission of the States notes that at least 28 states have policies that allow school security personnel to carry firearms, and at least eight states have policies allowing other school personnel to do so.
John-Michael Keyes, whose daughter was shot and killed at school in 2006 after a hostage situation at her high school in Colorado, said he thinks students have easy access to information about shootings and threats, and that drills can actually help counter some students' fear.
Keyes is the executive director of the "I Love U Guys" Foundation, which develops standard emergency response plans for schools, universities, businesses and other organizations. He said students tell him they like knowing what to do if something happens and knowing that adults have a plan.
In Kentucky, schools are required to conduct one lockdown drill in the first 30 days of the school year and again in January.
Schools started active shooter drills after the Columbine school shooting in 1999. Lockdowns are now standard, with teachers trained to lock classroom doors, turn off lights and direct students to hide in a corner. Federal data from 2015-16 show that nearly 95 percent of public schools held some sort of lockdown drill.
A best-practices report from the National Association of School Psychologists and the National Association of School Resource Officers that was updated in 2017 said lockdowns should remain the foundation of any plan, but noted that discussion has moved in recent years to "options-based approaches" — such as a "run, hide, fight" model — that allow school staff and others more independence in responding to evolving threats.
One options-based approach is the ALICE protocol recently adopted by Jefferson County Public Schools.
That program, which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate, focuses on tailoring actions to the situation, including training older students yo take active counter-measures such as throwing textbooks to get the intruder off-balance.
"As a population, we need an understanding of, "My gosh, what do I do if a shooter shows up in my place?' " said Greg Crane, founder of the ALICE training program.
Crane said he was proud to learn about the Boyd children's reaction on the day of the Kroger shooting.
"The kids obviously listened and learned," Crane said. "It's obviously unfortunate that it's the times we live in, but it's the reality. And if it's the reality, we should be preparing for it."
Schools across the country have chosen different models for reacting to active shooter scenarios and have handled preparedness in different ways. Some do realistic simulations, complete with screaming students or administrators jiggling door handles.
The NASP report notes that it is "critical that participation in drills be appropriate to individual developmental levels," saying that schools must be careful about how it handles drills. For instance, it said, participation should never be mandatory, and schools need to carefully weigh the use of props such as Airsoft guns in any simulation.
Connie Coartney, an Oldham County mom and the state lead for the Kentucky chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said she remembers the first time her daughter told her about an active shooter drill at her school.
Her daughter, then 6 or 7 years old, told her mother her class had played a game "to be super quiet so the bad people wouldn't find us."
"It’s great that you hear it and think they know what to do," Coartney said.
But she hated that her daughter might worry about someone at school wanting to hurt her.
"It’s not like a fire drill or something that would be an accident or something like that; it’s someone seeking to hurt them," Coartney said.
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One day, her friend's son was on the playground when an ambulance pulled up to the school, she said. The EMTs were there because a student had fallen, but Coartney said her friend's son "was terrified and thought someone had shot up the school."
"That's where we are in our country right now," Coartney said. She added, "It's pretty sad that my kid has to think about exits and where (her) desk is in the classroom."
During the lockdown last week at the Jeffersontown theater, Boyd said she felt relief that her sons knew what to do, which helped her stay focused and calm.
Later, Boyd said, she sent messages to her boys' teachers, thanking them for teaching the lockdown drills.
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But Boyd said she's also angry.
Angry at the shooter who has now made her younger son hesitant to go into a Kroger.
Angry that her children even have to practice what to do in case of an active shooter.
Children's "innocence should be protected," she said. "Kids shouldn’t experience violence… We’ve kind of taken their innocence from them too early."
Boyd's children have asked her about the Kroger shooting a couple times since that day, she said. When they learned that the two victims were a grandfather and a mom, Cole and Vance were crushed.
"(My kids) were upset," Boyd said. "They wanted to know why it happened. I really didn't have a good answer for them."
Allison Ross: 502-582-4241; email@example.com; Twitter: @allisonSross. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/allisonr. Laura Ungar: 502-582-7190; firstname.lastname@example.org; Twitter @laura_ungar. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/laurau.
Active shooter: what to do
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has published a list of good practices for coping with an active shooter situation. Note: this report appears to be geared toward an active shooter in the workplace.
- Be aware of your environment and any possible dangers
- Take note of the two nearest exits in any facility you visit
- If you are in an office, stay there and secure the door
- If you are in a hallway, get into a room and secure the door
- As a last resort, attempt to take the active shooter down. When the shooter is at
close range and you cannot flee, your chance of survival is much greater if you
try to incapacitate him/her