#he looks like me when we had to do tornado drills in elementary school and i would crawl under my desk

[thefaeriejar]

cillian murphy, disco pigs, 1996

[etraytin]

Poem Rough Draft

College is in full swing in the bedroom and the first day of fifth grade is unfolding in the home office, so I’m in the living room, standing by for technical or moral support and trying to put minimal pressure on the wifi. I’ve been sorting through a bunch of random word processor documents from the last few months, and I found this poem I forgot I wrote. It’s super rough, probably needs a real ending, but I thought I’d put it up just to see whether there’s anything real here that people can respond to. 

This is Only a Drill

The dorm has a new fire alarm system this year. Much better, they say, and so sensitive! It will save your life. It rings seven times in the first month Mostly at night, its sensitive eyes confused by a steamy shower, a bag of popcorn, a blunt. We pull the screen from the window by the microwave Anyone who burns the popcorn must throw it out the window Like a sad smoky balloon of shame Before the alarm has time to notice it. Retrieving it from the bushes down below is optional. We know the alarms are false and we hate them, But still we obey, wrapped in blankets and stumbling down the stairs blinking and shivering and watching the firemen Who also understand this farce, Sweeping the building to roust any disobedient seniors Without bothering to put their masks on.

There is a stillness in the air today It looks like rain, but the air is not heavy It is waiting. I can feel the subtle sickness in the green-tinged sky. Something is coming, and it might come here. Tornado watch, says the television, Third one this month, but this one is different. Or maybe I'm just tired. The baby has been awake for a hundred thousand hours. He is teething and I may die of it. But I grew up on the edge of the prairie And this is different. Find the pet carrier and fish the kitten from under the bed She clings like velcro to carpet, duvet, me. Use a cloth to scoop the budgies from their cage, Put the baby in his carseat. I am definitely overreacting. There are still people outside. When I was little we had a basement. I would hide under the workbench and listen to the radio Every tornado was an adventure, Now there is an apartment with a huge sliding glass door. And all these tiny dependent lives. A mournful siren in the distance, Loud, soft, loud. Something is coming. We settle in the first floor hallway, No windows, ancient carpeting, a flickering florescent bulb. Only one neighbor joins us. We smile at one another and are silent as the baby whines and the birds huddle on their perch, bright, miserable flowers. The tornado touches down fifteen miles away.

I've never lived through a hurricane before I have watched them on television Safe and smug in the midwest as the houses float away. Tornadoes are green skies and strange air and sirens. This hurricane starts on a bright sunny day. It is unimaginably far away, but it is so big. People here talk about hurricanes like sports teams, Keep an eye on your favorites, make predictions with your friends. Which ones will dissolve, or swing up the east coast, Which ones could come our way. It's all a guessing game, but you trust the computer for clues Instead of the taste in the air. “The first 72 is on you” says the pamphlet at the library. We buy toilet paper, canned foods, batteries. I find a big coloring book in case the television goes out. He is five and does not know from hurricanes But he is excited because everyone is acting so strangely. The Red Cross calls my cell phone,  A shelter is opening. Come and help.  I double check my supplies, pack a backpack, and go. Red vest, name badge, and I am safety Even if I do not feel safe.

Substitute teaching at the elementary school Special ed reading, eighty dollars for the day. The first graders are restless on a Friday afternoon Poking one another and laughing too loud. Read this word, this is 'house', can you say 'ou'? Say it again, now draw a picture. Yes, that's very good. Don't poke your friend, that's not nice. Now let's all- The boxy speaker on the ceiling hisses static. Twenty faces swivel up like sunflowers. A woman's voice, firm, loud. “LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN, LOCKDOWN” Knowing it was coming does not make it better. “It's just a drill,” we whisper as the students flee their tiny chairs, “It's just practice, you are safe.” Nobody says anything else. The children press themselves into the closets, hidden between the backpacks Pressed against the open doors, arms around their knees. I  don't know what to do, so I huddle as well, Just outside the closet with the children who do not fit. Twenty pairs of wide eyes, twenty silent mouths, Even if the quick rasp of breaths seems so loud. I look up and see the teacher, younger than me, Maybe a few years past college. She is standing by the door. She knows it is a drill, but her face is grim. Her aide stands with her, my mom's age. Five minutes ago we were reading about Clifford Now I watch them as they imagine What it would be like to die for their students. We all jump when someone outside shakes the door Testing the lock and our nerves. Nobody cries. It could be five minutes or an hour (It is seven minutes) “The lockdown drill is over, thank you all.” Everyone breathes again. The lights come back on, the window shades go up. Everything is the same, but no one is learning any more today.

[newstfionline]

What Are Active-Shooter Drills Doing to Kids?

By James Hamblin, The Atlantic, Feb. 28, 2018

There’s always at least one kid in tears, as they huddle under their desks in the dark. Still Beth Manias, an early-elementary literacy teacher outside of Seattle, tries to act upbeat and relaxed.

“I have them whisper about their favorite candy, dinner, books, movies--whatever, as a distraction,” Manias told me. She tells the kids they’re practicing to stay safe in case there’s ever a bear on campus. Though, she admits, “They always see through this. The older they get, the more savvy they become, probably because they are exposed to more of the news.”

At schools across the country, more children are taking part in mandatory “active-shooter drills.” Forgoing any pretense of a bear, sometimes a faculty member plays the role of a shooter, jiggling doorknobs as children practice keeping perfectly silent. Many parents, teachers, and students say that the experience is somewhere between upsetting and traumatizing.

Which may be worthwhile, if it were clear that the drills saved lives.

Active-shooter drills came into existence after the Columbine massacre in 1999. What is known of their long-term psychological effects comes from the reports of people now in early adulthood.

Ryan Marino, an emergency-medicine physician at the University of Pittsburgh, recalled that his school had adopted the drills during that period, after a student was found to have a “death list” and access to guns. He told me the drills didn’t seem real until he was 12, and a fellow student coughed during one of the drills. “The teacher told us that if this had been real, we would all be dead.”

“That single experience shaped my childhood,” Marino said. “Having to practice and prepare for a peer coming to my school and shooting at me and my friends was something that really changed the overall atmosphere. Looking back, it was a major shift in how the world felt.”

In the two weeks since the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, new and renewed calls for such drills raise the question of whether they do any good--and if they might be doing harm.

The day after the event, Susan Hennessey, the executive editor of Lawfare, tweeted: “Feeling mildly nauseous reading a note from my kid’s preschool about implementing active-shooter drills.”

Brian Leff, a writer in Los Angeles, told me his fifth-grade daughter’s principal just announced the school is contemplating a surprise lockdown drill. “Now my daughter can’t stop thinking about when it’s going to happen and how she’ll know if it’s ‘real’ or not.”

The writer Allison Gibson says that at her 4-year-old son’s preschool, they’re called “self-control drills,” because the goal is to get the students very quiet. “The first time he mentioned it, when he was 2, I had to piece together what he was referring to, and it nearly broke me.”

Of course, general lockdown and disaster drills have a long history; a generation of Americans came of age hiding under desks from nuclear bombs. While the idea of such a maneuver protecting a person from a bomb blast or nuclear fallout became fodder for jokes, the drills themselves had insidious effects on kids’ senses of safety. Some teachers reported that students’ artwork changed to feature mushroom clouds and sometimes the child’s own death, bringing a pervasive sense of danger into the places where kids most need to feel safe.

Despite some similarities to natural-disaster and Cold War drills, active-shooter drills also mean exposing kids to the idea that at any point, someone they know may try to kill them.

“It’s good to do emergency drills, but active shooters are not a drill anyone should have to do,” says Meredith Corley, who taught math in Colorado in the aftermath of Columbine. “It re-traumatizes kids who have experienced violence. Getting the kids settled back into the work of learning after lockdown drills is a nightmare. That mind-set has no place in a learning environment.”

“I was slightly too young for bomb drills, but in greater Kansas City, tornado drills were de rigueur,” says Lily Alice, a Midwesterner born in 1965. “We did have tornados now and then. The difference, of course, is that no one stockpiles them to use against other people, and weather forecasts mitigated some fear.”

Even President Trump, who has expressed support for arming teachers, has warned against active-shooter drills. During a White House meeting last week, he said, “If I’m a child and I’m 10 years old, and they say we’re going to have an active-shooter drill, I say, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Well, people may come in and shoot you’--I think that’s a very negative thing ... to be honest. I don’t like it.”

Studies of whether active-shooter drills actually prevent harm are all but impossible. Case studies are difficult to parse. In Parkland, for example, the site of the recent shooting, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, had an active-shooter drill just last month. The shooter had been through such drills. Purposely countering them may have been a reason that, as he was beginning his rampage, the shooter pulled a fire alarm.

In any case, preparedness drills always change the baseline level of risk that people perceive. This heightening can manifest as stress and anxiety, not to mention changing the way kids understand how people treat one another--to even consider violence an option, not in some abstract way.

Colleen Derkatch, an associate professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, studies how we assess risk when it comes to our health. “The more prepared we are, the more heightened our sense of risk,” she told me. “And one potential effect we haven’t considered is how these kinds of preparedness activities affect kids psychologically, and could increase a sense of feeling at risk. They really expand the ways in which we feel increasingly under siege.”

Preparedness activities, that is, are never neutral. Derkatch’s work relates this concept to the anxiety wrought by a culture of “wellness” products, which are ostensibly meant to keep us healthy, but also enhance our awareness of health risks. “They give us a sense that we’re all constantly on the edge of illness,” Derkatch told me. “Preparedness can be a good thing, but it has very real costs and consequences. For children whose personalities are just forming--who are figuring out what kind of world they live in--if this is the input they get, I think it will have a significant impact down the road.”

Derkatch has an 11-year-old daughter who is in the sixth grade. In her school, they’ve done lockdown drills, but the drills are the sort that are generalizable to any emergency. The teachers are very clear that it’s just a drill, and they lock the doors, and kids stay in their seats. There’s no hiding or barricading, as many schools in the United States now require.

If you were to move to the United States, I asked Derkatch, would you want your daughter going through these sorts of drills?

“No,” she said. “But I wouldn’t move to the United States. And guns are the reason why. Guns and health care.”

“Kids perceive the world generally as a bit of a dangerous place now because of how they tend to be closely supervised at almost all times,” said Derkatch. “If you look at the proposals in the United States, it sounds like they’re trying to make schools an awful lot like prisons, with monitored perimeters and armed guards and possibly armed teachers. You could extrapolate from the experiences of kids living in potentially violent situations, where you never know what’s going to happen. That does have a profound impact on kids.”

“I will never be able to explain it well, but losing a feeling of safety as a child, especially at school, is a major thing,” said Marino, the emergency physician who was terrified to cough. “Anyone who has not gone through school with active-shooter drills can never understand what it feels like.”

[moshfeghpilled]

describe how each high school year by semester went for you

9th grade: We don’t call it a play date anymore, it is hanging out, hanging by our toes like wet lipped fruit bats, like jungle gym monkey kids. Young and swollen. Blood, immature blood, pink blood, fresh meat blood pepto bismol up the wazoo, and spit under my bed. Code names aren’t for spies, they’re for 14 year old girls with googley eyes, not that we needed them. Kevin and Grace, Ellie and Joshua, Paloma and Matt which is weird because I’m hot for him, and they kinda look like siblings. Pink shorts, black tights, Jimmy Eat World, pizza bagels and lucky charms under a fresh white linen morning like detergent sealed crust between my eyelids, you tore them open. I mean, not yet. But soon. I discover neon sex scenes, Sky Ferreira, and Skins and this is where the final hopscotch box stops; at the end of the subway platform. This is where I’m supposed to jump. Monkey balls fall on our heads as we walk home, and autumn leaves crunch like drum line snare beats. All godless girls with snakes and cherry lollipops and 9 millimeters pointed at our clits, Bend it Like Beckham under your itchy wool blankets, Alice’s mom thinks I’m cool, and I stay for dinner and crack some risky jokes like a fox among wolves. (I think he looks at me when I look away). Me and Hana FaceTime I take screenshots of her dancing with her cat. The girls who play soft ball in short shorts, the girls who call them sluts, the boys who watch. We dance through rainbows in the sprinklers on the way to the Homecoming dance and pretend we don’t care we don’t have dates. We’re floating in the cytoplasm, floating on the cotton candy overdose cause our parents drop us off at the bowling alley but we are too loyal to sneak out the back. We pool our money every Friday after school for the spring break road trip we’re going on when Hana gets a car, and one of us has lost our virginity, and none of us are scared of the dark.

Miss Budd yelled at me for not standing for the pledge of allegiance, and I was 4 years old again. My English teacher held me back, and held my hand, and gave me a safety pin for my missing button, and told me it would be. Okay.

10th grade: We were on the news that year. Cristo’s curls on KTLA, solemn, and not the boy cross eyed and high with his pants around his ankles. Suddenly we’re all standing up straight, suddenly we’re being told we can’t wear leggings because somebody posted a video of Penelope having sex with Max on Facebook. Suddenly we’re underground in the girls locker room (red varsity knee socks, Dina drowning the spider nests with Victoria’s Secret rose perfume, humid with shame and lesbian suspicion) holding our arms in front of our naked breasts, single file like ants for the syphilis test. The boys who drew penises in fire and salt on the soccer field grass, like druid frat boys, but not the boys who put gorilla glue in the classroom locks, and not the boys who wrote their hit list in the red pen on the back of Mr. Chan’s syllabus and ended up in court, who called in a bomb threat, just to get the test pushed back. We all took turns getting our ghosts exorcized in the principals office. It was pompeii and pandemonium, and nobody was safe, not even us girls sleeping wrapped in the dust of library encyclopedias. You moved away from me like I was illiciting the restless black dreams on your grandmas shitty air mattress. The sheets are clean enough, but this attic is haunted, you keep waking up in the middle of the night to your body sinking like a pirate ship caught by the Kraken, the floor gnawing at your bones again so you just. Got up. And slept somewhere else. My English teacher held me back, and told me I was a good writer but don’t be so angry, and I cried right there, and she gave me a kleenex from her Shakespeare tissue holder and I blew this stupid pain head first out of my nose. I never told you about that. Maybe if I had you would’ve felt bad for me and stayed a little longer. But you hung out with those buckwild kids under the spot by the willow tree, and it was easy. it was just snuffing out an annoyance. A mosquito licking the ruby of your earrings that you shooed away. Our birthstones were both rubies, you know, we were twin cancers with balmy skin and busted appendixes, the aliens took you once and the only explanation was a scar on your spine, and I reckon I should’ve known they’d come back for you.

(You are gonna tell your kids about these cherry cola years of golden suburbia, and midnight blue debauchery snapping teenage knees, and furrow your brow forgetting the name of the girl you spent the first two calling your best friend.) You cheered at football games. You got drunk with them at night, and you were bursting and missing teeth like a watermelon smile, you rubbed up against each other like cats they touched you in all the right places and you didn’t text me anymore. You went to sleepovers and posted photos on Instagram, I wasn’t invited, I thought this bullshit was supposed to stop happening in elementary school. All the things we thought would never happen, lockdown drills, fire drills, earthquake drills and we still weren’t prepared. It was. Pandemonium. It was. Chemical fires in Mr. Dow’s science class. And me and my plans were just. so fucking boring standing next to your cherry blossom hurricane. You didn’t wait for me after class anymore and I just. Looked so stupid trying to catch up. Blood, mature blood, cows blood in the manure for the roses to eat. Black blood, like storm sky, I dish out this milkshake I pick the scab and I lick the blood away. Thomas comes out and dubs himself the gay cliche, we walk home together on the yellow brick road, and we pray a tornado will land the school library on our corpses so we can die with those sparkly shoes on. Those ruby shoes on. The Fates gagged me with a pack of jolly ranchers. I got straight A’s while Rome was falling. Nobody has ever made me feel so small.

11th grade: New school. The kids talk different here. Depression in California is like getting a cold in mid-July. So ironic it’s almost insulting. I’m pretty sure it was raining all year, but don’t count on it, I lived sub-terrestrialy with my mothers tulip bulbs. Today��s Wednesday? I thought it was Friday? I thought yesterday was Sunday? Depression in California is like running after a rabbit in the woods. It doesn’t matter how sunny it is, you will suddenly look up and it’s night, and the trees are not your friends, even when they are as skinny and shaky as you. You will get stuck in the swamp, leave your shoes behind, and not even remember why you were out here in the first place.

Headache. Stomach ache. Lots of those, those are easy to fake. Menstrual cramps, vomiting, gut wrenching, kinda vomiting. A personal favorite. I got to get my hands dirty for that one, I got to reach for the gag reflex like a remote control and press fast forward and feel my arc capsizing, until the static buzzed and I was pale like southern gothic tragedy, I’m not bulimic I just don’t wanna go to school. Depression in California is like an abandoned zoo. Everything echoing animal shrieks. They set them free but the cages were empty long before that. I make some friends, nice ones who laugh at my jokes, and I feel like I should get a sticker for it, but I do more nervous shaking than laughing.

Depression in California is like a badly maintenanced carnival. We’ve gone around the ferris wheel 8 times now and nobody seems to notice. The cotton candy polluting my blood, running slow and globby while the kids below spin, the kids drop, the kids could die, but they just giggle hand in hand with smiling clowns who pump them full of teeth rotting sweets, the winking lights are blurry this far away, and it feels like eons before we’ll get back to the bottom. I’m out of tokens. I think I’m just gonna jump.  

12th grade: Trump won. I think I might like girls. My dad jokes about his own death so I know what it means to be angry now, like femurs forged from the goddamn ring of Isildur. Is this what’s normal now? Fucking boys who are oil slick and easy living, and lose my socks in their dorm rooms? Meet them for diner food and xans on the weekend, and everything just temporary? Is that just what everybody wants now? My brother got a green card marriage, but I guess he loves her for real now. We watch the Walking Dead until the streetlights glaze over our eyes, he asks me if I have a boyfriend, no. If I’ve had any since I last saw him, no. If no is my favorite word, yes. Thing is I’ve never been anyone’s girl cause I’ve got a volcano where I should have a stomach. I know what it is to live on the red planet. But I ignore all that and go to concerts that bleed beer and swoon for boys who drink the blood. I guess we’re used to falling off of things so we do it on purpose now. It’s not over but I know how it’s gonna end. Cracked skull, and police lights. And to the break of dawn on Brandon’s roof, boxers stained with mayonnaise, and Deadpool is probably his favorite movie or some dumb white boy shit like that. I’m not gonna cry when I leave for college, I’m gonna cry at the car rental watching the sun bleed out on the trees. I’m gonna cry in the knothole of an oak tree, hiding from the freshman mixer party in the woods I knew I shouldn’t have come to once the social anxiety starts clawing up soaked in the gallon of strawberry Crush I downed to calm myself down. You know, in some other parallel universe, my parents never divorced and we dispute where the sugar pantry should be at inopportune times, and I don’t straight jacket myself with the echoplex sound of my mother screaming over my dead body just to not inhale the chlorox under the sink. I was so bloody, I just wanted to be clean.

I thought it was like the 80’s, the rusty exhaust pipe of Matt’s car turning the snow black while he’s wasting time daydreaming of my piston pumping sloppy hips, and rumored things that happen in the backseat, and kicking cans in no particular direction, and first love sticky and first love stabbed into your kidney and you never really recover. I thought it was sixteen candles, and say anything, but it’s getting bloodshot squirrelly smoking hash in the disabled bathroom stall. It’s a personality disorder grown up from the ground like a mushroom that is poison to the touch, and thrown away birthday presents, and valentines day balloons stuck in the trees. It’s dropping the last slice of college acceptance celebration cake on the floor for your dogs breakfast, and cartoon rain puddles for eyes talking about how scary it is to drive on the freeway. Karina and Maddie rough housing like pit bulls in fifth period cause we don’t do shit in that class and pretending that we are not all gonna be strangers in 6 weeks before we. Before we. Please don’t make me say it out loud.

My English teacher held me back, and told me to make up the quiz I missed, and that was the only time I will ever be happy that some strangers just stay that way. And Daddy, I will miss you when you leave me, and Daddy I will meet you in the next life you just gotta wait for me ok?

I am not the kind of girl people have crushes on. I am the kind of girl who can survive 18 stealing food from parties, couch surfing, living like a lightning bolt. There one minute, and gone the next.

[nancygduarteus]

What Are Active-Shooter Drills Doing to Kids?

There’s always at least one kid in tears, as they huddle under their desks in the dark. Still Beth Manias, an early-elementary literacy teacher outside of Seattle, tries to act upbeat and relaxed.

“I have them whisper about their favorite candy, dinner, books, movies—whatever, as a distraction,” Manias told me. She tells the kids they’re practicing to stay safe in case there’s ever a bear on campus. Though, she admits, “They always see through this. The older they get, the more savvy they become, probably because they are exposed to more of the news.”

At schools across the country, more children are taking part in mandatory “active-shooter drills.” Forgoing any pretense of a bear, sometimes a faculty member plays the role of a shooter, jiggling doorknobs as children practice keeping perfectly silent. Many parents, teachers, and students say that the experience is somewhere between upsetting and traumatizing.

Which may be worthwhile, if it were clear that the drills saved lives.

Active-shooter drills came into existence after the Columbine massacre in 1999. What is known of their long-term psychological effects comes from the reports of people now in early adulthood.

Ryan Marino, an emergency-medicine physician at the University of Pittsburgh, recalled that his school had adopted the drills during that period, after a student was found to have a “death list” and access to guns. He told me the drills didn’t seem real until he was 12, and a fellow student coughed during one of the drills. “The teacher told us that if this had been real, we would all be dead.”

“That single experience shaped my childhood,” Marino said. “Having to practice and prepare for a peer coming to my school and shooting at me and my friends was something that really changed the overall atmosphere. Looking back, it was a major shift in how the world felt.”

In the two weeks since the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, new and renewed calls for such drills raise the question of whether they do any good—and if they might be doing harm.

The day after the event, Susan Hennessey, the executive editor of Lawfare, tweeted: “Feeling mildly nauseous reading a note from my kid’s preschool about implementing active-shooter drills.”

Brian Leff, a writer in Los Angeles, told me his fifth-grade daughter’s principal just announced the school is contemplating a surprise lockdown drill. “Now my daughter can’t stop thinking about when it’s going to happen and how she’ll know if it’s ‘real’ or not.”

The writer Allison Gibson says that at her 4-year-old son’s preschool, they’re called “self-control drills,” because the goal is to get the students very quiet. “The first time he mentioned it, when he was 2, I had to piece together what he was referring to, and it nearly broke me.”

Of course, general lockdown and disaster drills have a long history; a generation of Americans came of age hiding under desks from nuclear bombs. While the idea of such a maneuver protecting a person from a bomb blast or nuclear fallout became fodder for jokes, the drills themselves had insidious effects on kids’ senses of safety. Some teachers reported that students’ artwork changed to feature mushroom clouds and sometimes the child’s own death, bringing a pervasive sense of danger into the places where kids most need to feel safe.

Despite some similarities to natural-disaster and Cold War drills, active-shooter drills also mean exposing kids to the idea that at any point, someone they know may try to kill them.

“It’s good to do emergency drills, but active shooters are not a drill anyone should have to do,” says Meredith Corley, who taught math in Colorado in the aftermath of Columbine. “It re-traumatizes kids who have experienced violence. Getting the kids settled back into the work of learning after lockdown drills is a nightmare. That mind-set has no place in a learning environment.”

“I was slightly too young for bomb drills, but in greater Kansas City, tornado drills were de rigueur,” says Lily Alice, a Midwesterner born in 1965. “We did have tornados now and then. The difference, of course, is that no one stockpiles them to use against other people, and weather forecasts mitigated some fear.”

Even President Trump, who has expressed support for arming teachers, has warned against active-shooter drills. During a White House meeting last week, he said, “If I’m a child and I’m 10 years old, and they say we’re going to have an active-shooter drill, I say, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Well, people may come in and shoot you’—I think that’s a very negative thing ... to be honest. I don’t like it.”

Zachary Levinsky, a lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, is one of few academics who has studied active-shooter drills. He argues that though some school violence always existed, Columbine marked a shift of the burden of prevention: “Schools were somehow positioned as blamable—as responsible for these massacres.” This created an institutional concern for reputational risk management. To implement something like an active-shooter drill was to signal to parents and the community that the school is being proactive—it was doing something.

Of course, a demand for action does not often make for prudent decisions when it comes to harm reduction. Drills cover administrator and school-district liability, and they may make parents feel better knowing that their kids are in a school that’s taking decisive action. But what are the longer-term effects on the children’s health and development?

Studies of whether active-shooter drills actually prevent harm are all but impossible. Case studies are difficult to parse. In Parkland, for example, the site of the recent shooting, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, had an active-shooter drill just last month. The shooter had been through such drills. Purposely countering them may have been a reason that, as he was beginning his rampage, the shooter pulled a fire alarm.

In any case, preparedness drills always change the baseline level of risk that people perceive. This heightening can manifest as stress and anxiety, not to mention changing the way kids understand how people treat one another—to even consider violence an option, not in some abstract way.

Colleen Derkatch, an associate professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, studies how we assess risk when it comes to our health. “The more prepared we are, the more heightened our sense of risk,” she told me. “And one potential effect we haven’t considered is how these kinds of preparedness activities affect kids psychologically, and could increase a sense of feeling at risk. They really expand the ways in which we feel increasingly under siege.”

Preparedness activities, that is, are never neutral. Derkatch’s work relates this concept to the anxiety wrought by a culture of “wellness” products, which are ostensibly meant to keep us healthy, but also enhance our awareness of health risks. “They give us a sense that we’re all constantly on the edge of illness,” Derkatch told me. “Preparedness can be a good thing, but it has very real costs and consequences. For children whose personalities are just forming—who are figuring out what kind of world they live in—if this is the input they get, I think it will have a significant impact down the road.”

The idea extends to the fact that a child is much more likely to be abused by a parent than shot in school; but there would be obvious limits to the value of putting kids through realistic simulations in which a parent turns on them.

Derkatch has an 11-year-old daughter who is in the sixth grade. In her school, they’ve done lockdown drills, but the drills are the sort that are generalizable to any emergency. The teachers are very clear that it’s just a drill, and they lock the doors, and kids stay in their seats. There’s no hiding or barricading, as many schools in the United States now require.

If you were to move to the United States, I asked Derkatch, would you want your daughter going through these sorts of drills?

“No,” she said. “But I wouldn’t move to the United States. And guns are the reason why. Guns and health care.”

The two are, of course, now intertwined. President Trump and many other Republicans have a penchant for blaming “mental illness” for mass shootings—even though most shooters have no known or diagnosable mental illness. People who are mentally ill are much more likely to be victims than murderers. Most are rather, like the shooter in Parkland, described as isolated, troubled, angry, resentful men and boys. Many have a history of childhood trauma, like being abused or neglected. It is rare that a shooter has come up in an environment with multiple adults on whom they could rely—where they felt safe and secure.

A sense of safety and security in childhood is integrally tied to mental and physical health later in life—as well as emotional wellbeing, and the formation of the coping mechanisms that allow a person to deal with later adversity in ways that do not involve killing. It is this sense that can be undermined sometimes even by the best of intentions.

“Kids perceive the world generally as a bit of a dangerous place now because of how they tend to be closely supervised at almost all times,” said Derkatch. “If you look at the proposals in the United States, it sounds like they’re trying to make schools an awful lot like prisons, with monitored perimeters and armed guards and possibly armed teachers. You could extrapolate from the experiences of kids living in potentially violent situations, where you never know what’s going to happen. That does have a profound impact on kids.”

“I will never be able to explain it well, but losing a feeling of safety as a child, especially at school, is a major thing,” said Marino, the emergency physician who was terrified to cough. “Anyone who has not gone through school with active-shooter drills can never understand what it feels like.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/02/effects-of-active-shooter/554150/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

What Are Active-Shooter Drills Doing to Kids?

There’s always at least one kid in tears, as they huddle under their desks in the dark. Still Beth Manias, an early-elementary literacy teacher outside of Seattle, tries to act upbeat and relaxed.

“I have them whisper about their favorite candy, dinner, books, movies—whatever, as a distraction,” Manias told me. She tells the kids they’re practicing to stay safe in case there’s ever a bear on campus. Though, she admits, “They always see through this. The older they get, the more savvy they become, probably because they are exposed to more of the news.”

At schools across the country, more children are taking part in mandatory “active-shooter drills.” Forgoing any pretense of a bear, sometimes a faculty member plays the role of a shooter, jiggling doorknobs as children practice keeping perfectly silent. Many parents, teachers, and students say that the experience is somewhere between upsetting and traumatizing.

Which may be worthwhile, if it were clear that the drills saved lives.

Active-shooter drills came into existence after the Columbine massacre in 1999. What is known of their long-term psychological effects comes from the reports of people now in early adulthood.

Ryan Marino, an emergency-medicine physician at the University of Pittsburgh, recalled that his school had adopted the drills during that period, after a student was found to have a “death list” and access to guns. He told me the drills didn’t seem real until he was 12, and a fellow student coughed during one of the drills. “The teacher told us that if this had been real, we would all be dead.”

“That single experience shaped my childhood,” Marino said. “Having to practice and prepare for a peer coming to my school and shooting at me and my friends was something that really changed the overall atmosphere. Looking back, it was a major shift in how the world felt.”

In the two weeks since the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, new and renewed calls for such drills raise the question of whether they do any good—and if they might be doing harm.

The day after the event, Susan Hennessey, the executive editor of Lawfare, tweeted: “Feeling mildly nauseous reading a note from my kid’s preschool about implementing active-shooter drills.”

Brian Leff, a writer in Los Angeles, told me his fifth-grade daughter’s principal just announced the school is contemplating a surprise lockdown drill. “Now my daughter can’t stop thinking about when it’s going to happen and how she’ll know if it’s ‘real’ or not.”

The writer Allison Gibson says that at her 4-year-old son’s preschool, they’re called “self-control drills,” because the goal is to get the students very quiet. “The first time he mentioned it, when he was 2, I had to piece together what he was referring to, and it nearly broke me.”

Of course, general lockdown and disaster drills have a long history; a generation of Americans came of age hiding under desks from nuclear bombs. While the idea of such a maneuver protecting a person from a bomb blast or nuclear fallout became fodder for jokes, the drills themselves had insidious effects on kids’ senses of safety. Some teachers reported that students’ artwork changed to feature mushroom clouds and sometimes the child’s own death, bringing a pervasive sense of danger into the places where kids most need to feel safe.

Despite some similarities to natural-disaster and Cold War drills, active-shooter drills also mean exposing kids to the idea that at any point, someone they know may try to kill them.

“It’s good to do emergency drills, but active shooters are not a drill anyone should have to do,” says Meredith Corley, who taught math in Colorado in the aftermath of Columbine. “It re-traumatizes kids who have experienced violence. Getting the kids settled back into the work of learning after lockdown drills is a nightmare. That mind-set has no place in a learning environment.”

“I was slightly too young for bomb drills, but in greater Kansas City, tornado drills were de rigueur,” says Lily Alice, a Midwesterner born in 1965. “We did have tornados now and then. The difference, of course, is that no one stockpiles them to use against other people, and weather forecasts mitigated some fear.”

Even President Trump, who has expressed support for arming teachers, has warned against active-shooter drills. During a White House meeting last week, he said, “If I’m a child and I’m 10 years old, and they say we’re going to have an active-shooter drill, I say, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Well, people may come in and shoot you’—I think that’s a very negative thing ... to be honest. I don’t like it.”

Zachary Levinsky, a lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, is one of few academics who has studied active-shooter drills. He argues that though some school violence always existed, Columbine marked a shift of the burden of prevention: “Schools were somehow positioned as blamable—as responsible for these massacres.” This created an institutional concern for reputational risk management. To implement something like an active-shooter drill was to signal to parents and the community that the school is being proactive—it was doing something.

Of course, a demand for action does not often make for prudent decisions when it comes to harm reduction. Drills cover administrator and school-district liability, and they may make parents feel better knowing that their kids are in a school that’s taking decisive action. But what are the longer-term effects on the children’s health and development?

Studies of whether active-shooter drills actually prevent harm are all but impossible. Case studies are difficult to parse. In Parkland, for example, the site of the recent shooting, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, had an active-shooter drill just last month. The shooter had been through such drills. Purposely countering them may have been a reason that, as he was beginning his rampage, the shooter pulled a fire alarm.

In any case, preparedness drills always change the baseline level of risk that people perceive. This heightening can manifest as stress and anxiety, not to mention changing the way kids understand how people treat one another—to even consider violence an option, not in some abstract way.

Colleen Derkatch, an associate professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, studies how we assess risk when it comes to our health. “The more prepared we are, the more heightened our sense of risk,” she told me. “And one potential effect we haven’t considered is how these kinds of preparedness activities affect kids psychologically, and could increase a sense of feeling at risk. They really expand the ways in which we feel increasingly under siege.”

Preparedness activities, that is, are never neutral. Derkatch’s work relates this concept to the anxiety wrought by a culture of “wellness” products, which are ostensibly meant to keep us healthy, but also enhance our awareness of health risks. “They give us a sense that we’re all constantly on the edge of illness,” Derkatch told me. “Preparedness can be a good thing, but it has very real costs and consequences. For children whose personalities are just forming—who are figuring out what kind of world they live in—if this is the input they get, I think it will have a significant impact down the road.”

The idea extends to the fact that a child is much more likely to be abused by a parent than shot in school; but there would be obvious limits to the value of putting kids through realistic simulations in which a parent turns on them.

Derkatch has an 11-year-old daughter who is in the sixth grade. In her school, they’ve done lockdown drills, but the drills are the sort that are generalizable to any emergency. The teachers are very clear that it’s just a drill, and they lock the doors, and kids stay in their seats. There’s no hiding or barricading, as many schools in the United States now require.

If you were to move to the United States, I asked Derkatch, would you want your daughter going through these sorts of drills?

“No,” she said. “But I wouldn’t move to the United States. And guns are the reason why. Guns and health care.”

The two are, of course, now intertwined. President Trump and many other Republicans have a penchant for blaming “mental illness” for mass shootings—even though most shooters have no known or diagnosable mental illness. People who are mentally ill are much more likely to be victims than murderers. Most are rather, like the shooter in Parkland, described as isolated, troubled, angry, resentful men and boys. Many have a history of childhood trauma, like being abused or neglected. It is rare that a shooter has come up in an environment with multiple adults on whom they could rely—where they felt safe and secure.

A sense of safety and security in childhood is integrally tied to mental and physical health later in life—as well as emotional wellbeing, and the formation of the coping mechanisms that allow a person to deal with later adversity in ways that do not involve killing. It is this sense that can be undermined sometimes even by the best of intentions.

“Kids perceive the world generally as a bit of a dangerous place now because of how they tend to be closely supervised at almost all times,” said Derkatch. “If you look at the proposals in the United States, it sounds like they’re trying to make schools an awful lot like prisons, with monitored perimeters and armed guards and possibly armed teachers. You could extrapolate from the experiences of kids living in potentially violent situations, where you never know what’s going to happen. That does have a profound impact on kids.”

“I will never be able to explain it well, but losing a feeling of safety as a child, especially at school, is a major thing,” said Marino, the emergency physician who was terrified to cough. “Anyone who has not gone through school with active-shooter drills can never understand what it feels like.”

Article source here:The Atlantic