In many schools the command is simple. It’s a public address announcement:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThis is a level {1,2, or 3}<\/em> lockdown.\u00a0\u00a0Students return to your classroom<\/strong>\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0There are no other instructions, usually, just the motions of teachers going to their doors, \u201cgrabbing up\u201d kids in the hall, then closing.\u00a0\u00a0Then the sound of the click of dozens of locks, shutting tight against the outside world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happens next depends on the situation, labeled the \u201clevel\u201d. It\u2019s the reason for the lockdown in the first place.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps it\u2019s a medical emergency in the hallways; one where students and staff might interfere.\u00a0\u00a0Last year, while I was substitute teaching, a teacher downstairs suffered a critical medical emergency in the hall.\u00a0The building was \u201clocked down\u201d until the first responders arrived and transported him to the hospital.\u00a0\u00a0We were on \u201clevel two\u201d lockdown.\u00a0\u00a0Clear the hall, lock the doors, but continue teaching.\u00a0\u00a0The office will notify everyone when it time to \u201ccome out\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I spent my career teaching at a school located near an interstate highway.\u00a0\u00a0In the mid-1990\u2019s, we got a call from the local sheriff\u2019s office: some men accused of violent felonies were fleeing the police, and wrecked their vehicle.\u00a0\u00a0They then\u00a0\u00a0disappeared into the woods, not far from our school.\u00a0\u00a0We didn\u2019t have a \u201clockdown\u201d 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 \u201cLevel One Lockdown”.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cgood guys\u201d, the local Sheriff\u2019s SWAT team clearing the area. The fugitives were eventually caught a few miles down the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0They were searching for one of \u201cour\u201d kids: money owed, girlfriend issue, I don\u2019t remember.\u00a0\u00a0But they were armed with pepper spray, and began a class to class search to find their target.\u00a0\u00a0Other students tried to stop them – they got sprayed.\u00a0\u00a0Teachers and administrators ultimately confronted the \u201cinvaders\u201d, and they retreated.\u00a0\u00a0I was in the athletic training room, and the trainer and I were doing our best to \u201ctreat\u201d the sprayed students who stood up to the \u201cinvaders\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, that would\u00a0\u00a0trigger a \u201cfull\u201d lockdown, a Level Three.\u00a0\u00a0Teachers 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.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s the scariest lockdown, even to practice.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s the \u201cschool shooter\u201d lockdown, developed after the Columbine tragedy.\u00a0\u00a0The goal:\u00a0\u00a0to protect as many kids as possible by keeping them out of sight from potential shooters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And there have been \u201cvariations\u201d added to the \u201cfull\u201d lockdown.\u00a0\u00a0Piling furniture against the door to make it even harder to open.\u00a0\u00a0Preparing weapons, like full soup cans to use against an incoming shooter.\u00a0\u00a0And ultimately, to fight when there is no way to flee.\u00a0\u00a0A sixteen year-old at Oxford High School in Michigan, Tate Myre, exemplifies that.\u00a0When a classmate with a semi-automatic handgun starting shooting, Tate charged him.\u00a0\u00a0He was shot several times, and died in a squad car on the way to the hospital.\u00a0\u00a0But his actions bought time for other students to get away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n School buildings are huge, with some sections far away from others.\u00a0\u00a0In some cases, students at one end of the building might escape, while a shooter is in a different section.\u00a0 But that’s\u00a0 a dangerous alternative.\u00a0\u00a0There are school shooting cases where the shooters were outside, and waiting for students to evacuate the building.\u00a0\u00a0Still, sometimes action is better than hiding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Every student, teacher, administrator, coach, staff member and police officer knows the history of school shootings.\u00a0\u00a0Like 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0At Uvalde, literally dozens of law enforcement officers waited in a hallway outside of the \u201ckilling zone\u201d classrooms for more than an hour.\u00a0\u00a0The accepted \u201cstrategy\u201d engage and eliminate the shooter immediately, didn’t happen.\u00a0\u00a0So now when the call goes out over the police radio of “school shooter”, officers are even more aware of their obligations.\u00a0\u00a0No officer wants to get shot, but no one wants to wait to act while kids are shot and bleed out.\u00a0\u00a0Each officer is well aware of his or her role \u2013 go find the shooter and engage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And parents are just as aware about what happened in Uvalde.\u00a0\u00a0 Hundreds of parents waited a long hour outside of that elementary school, hoping for something, anything, to happen to save their child\u2019s life. When it did finally happen, it was too late for those nineteen kids and two teachers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our age of instant communication, word always gets out: a school shooter, shots fired. It\u2019s hard to blame parents who don\u2019t follow \u201cdirections\u201d. They don\u2019t go to the \u201creunion point\u201d; 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n School emergency “pranks” started with \u201cfake\u201d fire alarms.\u00a0\u00a0Some kid would succumb to the temptation of pulling the lever or breaking the glass.\u00a0\u00a0As an administrator when the alarm sounds the next five minutes is a race to get the building evacuated, find which alarm was pulled (there\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0If there isn\u2019t, then there\u2019s the \u201cinvestigation\u201d to determine who pulled the alarm, and why.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the Dean of Students at a high school, that investigation was my job.\u00a0\u00a0One year we had a series of alarms pulled at the worst possible time, during lunch.\u00a0\u00a0Somehow an alarm in the hallway by the gym was pulled several days in a row.\u00a0\u00a0Even with a camera on the alarm, we could not discover who was pulling the \u201cprank\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally we figured it out \u2013 the prank was on us.\u00a0\u00a0Most schools have a \u201cclimbing board\u201d, a wooden board with holes mounted on the wall where students would use pegs to climb to the top.\u00a0\u00a0On the other side of the wall from the peg board was the alarm, somehow now on a \u201chair-trigger\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0As 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.\u00a0\u00a0No one was in trouble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then schools were plagued with fake \u201cbomb threats\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0A random call or note threatened a bomb in the building.\u00a0\u00a0From a crisis standpoint that\u2019s easier to manage.\u00a0\u00a0Pull the fire alarm, evacuate the building, take the kids to a faraway stadium or field or school.\u00a0\u00a0Then, search the building for the \u201cnon-existent bomb\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Why keep the kids?\u00a0\u00a0Because it\u2019s important that \u201cbomb threat\u201d doesn\u2019t equal \u201cget out of school\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0Otherwise, there\u2019s even more incentive for the next call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who gets to search the building?\u00a0\u00a0Usually the staff, or at least the custodial staff and the administrators, often accompanied by Fire or Police.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0It takes a lot of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the new \u201cprank\u201d is called \u201cSwatting a school\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0The call goes to the police, not the school.\u00a0\u00a0There\u2019s a shooter in a building, hallway, or even a specific room.\u00a0\u00a0Shots have been fired, usually with mention of ballistic protective gear and semi-automatic rifles.\u00a0\u00a0The first warning to the school is either a frantic police call, or officers showing up in mass\u00a0around the building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s the scariest of times.\u00a0\u00a0Lockdown level three, police with guns drawn working their way through the classrooms, releasing each class to get out of the building.\u00a0\u00a0We\u2019ve all seen the pictures, kids with their hands up and shirttails out, racing through the hallway doors.\u00a0\u00a0Some just keep running \u2013 heading away from the school, the police, the threat of violence.\u00a0\u00a0In 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A school in my county, Licking Valley High and Middle School , got \u201cswatted\u201d on Friday.\u00a0\u00a0Licking Valley is between the suburbs of Newark and the countryside, a good place to go to school with an exceptional and unique academic record.\u00a0\u00a0The Middle School is on top of a hill in an older building, the \u201cnew\u201d High School is below.\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0\u00a0Some kids headed off into the nearby neighborhoods, others into the farm fields past the football stadium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A parent came, \u201clocked and loaded\u201d, ready to go and do whatever he could to save his kids.\u00a0\u00a0Police took him into custody \u2013 they had no idea: was he the threat, a friend or foe?\u00a0\u00a0He was later released.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 hard to blame them for not heading to the \u201creunion\u201d point. Not when the school is right there, close, with twelve hundred students standing in the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Licking Valley \u201csurvived\u201d the Swatting on Friday.\u00a0\u00a0No one was hurt, though I\u2019m sure they\u2019ll be kids who NEVER go back to school again.\u00a0\u00a0That fear, sitting in the corner, is so great, even the drills are more than un-nerving.\u00a0\u00a0And with all of that, everyone, kids, teachers, staff, administrators, police, were on a hair trigger.\u00a0\u00a0It 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.\u00a0\u00a0The \u201cprank\u201d could easily have cost lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We live in a tenuous world, only a phone call away from disaster.\u00a0 Friday was a\u00a0tough day for Licking Valley, with lessons to be learned.\u00a0\u00a0But real disaster was avoided, this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other schools should take heed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Times<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Our Times<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What Would You Do?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
A New Prank<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Bomb Threats<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Swatting<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Licking Valley<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Survival<\/h3>\n\n\n\n