7 in 10 schools now have shooting drills, needlessly traumatizing huge numbers of children

Libby Nelson · Friday, May 22, 2015, 11:22 am
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Schools are now treating mass shootings like tornadoes and earthquakes — disasters beyond their control that students must be prepared for at all costs.
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A new survey from the Education Department found that 70 percent of schools practice school shooting drills, up from 53 percent in 2008. They're most common at suburban schools, although they're generally widespread: 75 percent of suburban schools held a shooting drill in 2013.
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They might be doing more harm than good. American schools are safer than they've ever been. If the worst happens — someone shows up at a school intending to kill dozens of students — there's no evidence that having conducted mass shooting drills actually helps.
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Meanwhile, school employees and parents are beginning to complain that the drills themselves can be traumatizing.
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Great news: going to school is very, very safe

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School shootings seem scarily common. In the two years after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in December 2012, there were 49 shootings at K-12 schools in the US, according to a report from Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group; 15 of those shootings killed at least one person.
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News coverage gives the impression that schools have become more violent, not less, since the Columbine mass shooting in 1999. But federal data shows the number of students killed at school has actually dropped since the 1990s, even as public school enrollments climbed:
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The risk of a child getting killed by someone else at school in 2011, the last year for which there's final data, was about 1 in 5 million. That's slightly less likely than being struck by lightning. (In 2012, Sandy Hook drove up the homicide rate, but it doesn't seem to have changed the overall trend, according to the Education Department. The Everytown study appears to back this up.)
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It's possible that new safety measures after Columbine, including drills, contributed to the quick drop in the murder rate. But it's more likely that it's part of a bigger trend of declining crime and violence at school. The rate of "serious violent victimization" among students — rape, sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated assault — was about 1 in 1,000 in 2011, down from 1 in 100 in 1995. In 1995, 10 percent of students were victims of some kind of crime at school; in 2011, just 4 percent were.
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There's no evidence that mass shooting drills work
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