Lockdown
In many schools the command is simple. It’s a public address announcement: “This is a level {1,2, or 3} lockdown. Students return to your classroom”. There are no other instructions, usually, just the motions of teachers going to their doors, “grabbing up” kids in the hall, then closing. Then the sound of the click of dozens of locks, shutting tight against the outside world.
What happens next depends on the situation, labeled the “level”. It’s the reason for the lockdown in the first place. Perhaps it’s a medical emergency in the hallways; one where students and staff might interfere. Last year, while I was substitute teaching, a teacher downstairs suffered a critical medical emergency in the hall. The building was “locked down” until the first responders arrived and transported him to the hospital. We were on “level two” lockdown. Clear the hall, lock the doors, but continue teaching. The office will notify everyone when it time to “come out”.
Before Times
I spent my career teaching at a school located near an interstate highway. In the mid-1990’s, we got a call from the local sheriff’s office: some men accused of violent felonies were fleeing the police, and wrecked their vehicle. They then disappeared into the woods, not far from our school. We didn’t have a “lockdown” plan back then. It was in the “before times”; before the Columbine school massacre in 1999. But we did go into what we now call a “Level One Lockdown”.
All of the outside doors were locked, no one allowed in or out of the building. Students and staff stayed away from windows. As the Dean of Students, I watched with some worry as I saw camouflaged men with long rifles move stealthily through the woods. It took a moment to realize that they were the “good guys”, the local Sheriff’s SWAT team clearing the area. The fugitives were eventually caught a few miles down the road.
Back before Columbine, before local School Resource Officers and the obvious need for school security; some kids from a neighboring school literally broke into our building. They were searching for one of “our” kids: money owed, girlfriend issue, I don’t remember. But they were armed with pepper spray, and began a class to class search to find their target. Other students tried to stop them – they got sprayed. Teachers and administrators ultimately confronted the “invaders”, and they retreated. I was in the athletic training room, and the trainer and I were doing our best to “treat” the sprayed students who stood up to the “invaders”.
Our Times
Today, that would trigger a “full” lockdown, a Level Three. Teachers go to the doors and clear the halls, lock the doors, and place students in a part of the room out of sight from the door and, if possible, any windows. It’s the scariest lockdown, even to practice. It’s the “school shooter” lockdown, developed after the Columbine tragedy. The goal: to protect as many kids as possible by keeping them out of sight from potential shooters.
And there have been “variations” added to the “full” lockdown. Piling furniture against the door to make it even harder to open. Preparing weapons, like full soup cans to use against an incoming shooter. And ultimately, to fight when there is no way to flee. A sixteen year-old at Oxford High School in Michigan, Tate Myre, exemplifies that. When a classmate with a semi-automatic handgun starting shooting, Tate charged him. He was shot several times, and died in a squad car on the way to the hospital. But his actions bought time for other students to get away.
School buildings are huge, with some sections far away from others. In some cases, students at one end of the building might escape, while a shooter is in a different section. But that’s a dangerous alternative. There are school shooting cases where the shooters were outside, and waiting for students to evacuate the building. Still, sometimes action is better than hiding.
What Would You Do?
Every student, teacher, administrator, coach, staff member and police officer knows the history of school shootings. Like it or not, they all have thought about how they should respond, what they should do if gunshots are heard in the hall, or that tense announcement comes over the PA.
Last spring there was a tragedy in Uvalde, Texas. Twenty-one students and teachers died in a school shooting “spree” that raised all sorts of questions about law enforcement response. At Uvalde, literally dozens of law enforcement officers waited in a hallway outside of the “killing zone” classrooms for more than an hour. The accepted “strategy” engage and eliminate the shooter immediately, didn’t happen. So now when the call goes out over the police radio of “school shooter”, officers are even more aware of their obligations. No officer wants to get shot, but no one wants to wait to act while kids are shot and bleed out. Each officer is well aware of his or her role – go find the shooter and engage.
And parents are just as aware about what happened in Uvalde. Hundreds of parents waited a long hour outside of that elementary school, hoping for something, anything, to happen to save their child’s life. When it did finally happen, it was too late for those nineteen kids and two teachers.
In our age of instant communication, word always gets out: a school shooter, shots fired. It’s hard to blame parents who don’t follow “directions”. They don’t go to the “reunion point”; instead they head to the school, willing to do whatever they need to save their child. Sure they become a nuisance, and a hazard, and even a danger to the police involved, but after Uvalde how can you blame them?
A New Prank
School emergency “pranks” started with “fake” fire alarms. Some kid would succumb to the temptation of pulling the lever or breaking the glass. As an administrator when the alarm sounds the next five minutes is a race to get the building evacuated, find which alarm was pulled (there’s electronic notification) and determine if there is a real fire. The Fire Department automatically arrives and they have to decide that there is no risk to students. If there isn’t, then there’s the “investigation” to determine who pulled the alarm, and why.
As the Dean of Students at a high school, that investigation was my job. One year we had a series of alarms pulled at the worst possible time, during lunch. Somehow an alarm in the hallway by the gym was pulled several days in a row. Even with a camera on the alarm, we could not discover who was pulling the “prank”.
Finally we figured it out – the prank was on us. Most schools have a “climbing board”, a wooden board with holes mounted on the wall where students would use pegs to climb to the top. On the other side of the wall from the peg board was the alarm, somehow now on a “hair-trigger”. As the freshmen boys were showing off their climbing prowess, the pounding of the pegs was triggering the faulty warning box, and we were evacuating the school. No one was in trouble.
Bomb Threats
Then schools were plagued with fake “bomb threats”. A random call or note threatened a bomb in the building. From a crisis standpoint that’s easier to manage. Pull the fire alarm, evacuate the building, take the kids to a faraway stadium or field or school. Then, search the building for the “non-existent bomb”. Why keep the kids? Because it’s important that “bomb threat” doesn’t equal “get out of school”. Otherwise, there’s even more incentive for the next call.
Who gets to search the building? Usually the staff, or at least the custodial staff and the administrators, often accompanied by Fire or Police. The problem in this backpack age is that there are so many possibilities, bags left in the hurried evacuation, scattered by desks in dozens of classrooms. It takes a lot of time.
Swatting
But the new “prank” is called “Swatting a school”. The call goes to the police, not the school. There’s a shooter in a building, hallway, or even a specific room. Shots have been fired, usually with mention of ballistic protective gear and semi-automatic rifles. The first warning to the school is either a frantic police call, or officers showing up in mass around the building.
It’s the scariest of times. Lockdown level three, police with guns drawn working their way through the classrooms, releasing each class to get out of the building. We’ve all seen the pictures, kids with their hands up and shirttails out, racing through the hallway doors. Some just keep running – heading away from the school, the police, the threat of violence. In this cellphone world, they call on family or friends to pick them up somewhere far away from the school building, to escape from the craziness and the fear.
Licking Valley
A school in my county, Licking Valley High and Middle School , got “swatted” on Friday. Licking Valley is between the suburbs of Newark and the countryside, a good place to go to school with an exceptional and unique academic record. The Middle School is on top of a hill in an older building, the “new” High School is below. The call to police said that there was an armed shooter, and shots fired. Police had to check both buildings, door to door and hallway to hallway. It was some time before kids finally got outside on a pleasant morning, the faint coolness of fall in the air for the first time. Some kids headed off into the nearby neighborhoods, others into the farm fields past the football stadium.
A parent came, “locked and loaded”, ready to go and do whatever he could to save his kids. Police took him into custody – they had no idea: was he the threat, a friend or foe? He was later released.
What else could they do? The police, particularly after Uvalde, must respond, in force, and ready for action. The school must act, locking down, then releasing, then finally struggling to account for every kid. The parents – hard to blame them for not heading to the “reunion” point. Not when the school is right there, close, with twelve hundred students standing in the sun.
Survival
Licking Valley “survived” the Swatting on Friday. No one was hurt, though I’m sure they’ll be kids who NEVER go back to school again. That fear, sitting in the corner, is so great, even the drills are more than un-nerving. And with all of that, everyone, kids, teachers, staff, administrators, police, were on a hair trigger. It would have taken just a little, maybe a distraught parent with an AR-15, or a “country” kid with a hunting rifle hidden in the back of his truck, to set things off. The “prank” could easily have cost lives.
We live in a tenuous world, only a phone call away from disaster. Friday was a tough day for Licking Valley, with lessons to be learned. But real disaster was avoided, this time.
Other schools should take heed.
