This is the second part of a two-part observation/reflection resulting from my walk the other day in a park near my house. The first part was posted on Facebook (most who are reading this, I suspect, arrived here via the link in that post) and was about a super interesting podcast I listened to while I walked. This second part is a little less light and a whole lot more concerning (at least to me).
The place I walk most often is informally referred to as HAC. It’s in Hockessin, DE, just a couple of miles from our house. HAC refers to the Hockessin Athletic Club, a private health club facility. HAC’s facility is located in and is surrounded by Tweed Park, a public park in Hockessin. The park has a series of walking trails the longest of which encircles HAC’s building. It’s a pleasant place to walk. I tend to call the entire property HAC even though the walking trails in the park have nothing to do with HAC and are open to the members of the public, like me.
It becomes very apparent in the summer that children’s summer camp programming occurs in the park. I often see groups of children engaging with those who appear to be college-aged counselors in a variety of outdoor activities. They were out doing activities in the park. Fun, right?
A couple of times last week I saw them playing laser tag. Everyone (college-aged counselors included) was wearing and using laser tag equipment – headband sensors connected to child-sized toy versions of semi-automatic weapons. It appears to me that the large group has been divided into two teams. I imagine the team with the last shooter “standing” is the winner. The players could be seen running all over the park, hiding behind trees, finding their quarry, taking aim, and shooting. Pretty harmless, right? Sure, good clean fun.
Admittedly, when I was a kid, I played plenty of games like this, absent the fancy laser equipment of course. No harm, no foul. I’m a well-adjusted grown-up in spite of the sorts of games my friends and I played when we were that age.
But here’s the thing. We now live in society that is very different than the one I lived in the late 60’s when I was the same age as the laser-tag playing kids.
I’ll provide some data in a moment, but first a pair of anecdotes to demonstrate the differences between 1963 and 2023 – these specific to the notion of school children doing drills in their schools to prepare for various potentially injurious realities of the day.
In 1963, I was in 1st grade in Pennington, NJ. We had the typical fire drills, probably each month. But we also had air raid or civil defense drills – just one or two a year. In those drills, we were taken to the lunchroom in the basement of the school (Pennington Primary School) where we were to crouch down under the tables for a brief period of time. I didn’t necessarily understand the rationale at the time, and the drills ended just a year or so later, it seems, but it wasn’t long before I learned they were designed to prepare us for a nuclear attack.
Was I frightened? I don’t recall being afraid, but keep in mind, the rationale for these drills was not made entirely clear to the 1st grade me nor to my 1st grade friends – we tended to do what our teachers told us to do. Even later, when I learned the real purpose, the whole thing seemed to be so abstract so as not to be worrisome. I mean, it’s not like schools in the next town or across the country were being attacked with nuclear weapons and we needed to be ready for when those weapons found our school. First-graders in other parts of the country were not dying from ICBM missiles and scaring the crap out of all the other 1st graders.
Fast forward a few years.
I was in a 2nd grade classroom at a nearby elementary school 15-20 years ago when the school went into a lockdown drill. The teacher and my student teacher shepherded the students into the narrow and barely lit cloak room between the main part of the classroom and the wall adjacent to the hallway. We all hunched down in the shadows in a space designed for a group about half our size for the better part of 30 minutes while members of local law enforcement made their way around the outside of the building yelling, banging on windows, and trying to gain entry through the exterior doors in each classroom.
It was as unnerving an experience as I’ve ever had in a school building, and I’ve been in hundreds of them over the years. The 20 or so 2nd graders were absolutely freaked out – some crying, some trembling, some asking their teacher if they would be okay.
I didn’t stay for the rest of the day because I had other student teachers to see, but as I left, I wondered how the rest of the day would go for these children. Would their teachers find that these students were available for learning just like any other day? Would they be able to just pick up where they left off before the drill? Or would they need to spend time assuaging their students’ emotions based on the trauma caused by the drill? If a district or building administrator happened to be in this room to witness what I saw, would they continue to support drills of this sort? What do the data tell us about the effects of drills such as these?
The difference between 1963 and the present is that the reality providing the rationale for lockdown drills in present day is not abstract. Schools today are being attacked by active shooters and children are dying. This reality is one that 2nd graders can grasp to the extent that it has the potential to cause fear and panic, and do real psychological damage.
Here are some data, some may be arguable, but most not so much:
First, death by firearms in the US is on the rise over the past few decades (source – CDC. This chart and other interesting slices of CDC data are from USAFacts.org):
Second, there has been a steady increase in the number of mass shootings in our nation over the past few decades (source – The Violence Project). So far this year, there have been 43 deaths from mass shootings in the US:
Third, there has been an increase in the number of school shootings since 1970 and an increase in the number of victims (source of these charts and more– CHDS School Shooting Safety Compendium):
Fourth, according to research from Everytown.org,
95% of American public schools drill students on lockdown procedures. Yet, there is almost no research affirming the value of these drills for preventing school shootings or protecting the school community when shootings do occur.
Fifth, the same paper examines the effects of active shooter drills and gun violence on the mental health of children:
- Active
shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress
and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including
children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents,
and teachers.
- Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill.
Finally, Surviving a school shooting: Impacts on the mental health, education, and earnings of American youth, a study from the Stanford University Institute for Economic Policy Research, had these key findings:
- More than 100,000 American children attended a school at which a shooting took place in 2018 and 2019;
- A higher rate of antidepressant use among those exposed to a school shooting in the years following the gun violence;
- School shootings lead to drops in student enrollment and a decline in average test scores;
- School shootings also lead to an increase in student absenteeism and the likelihood of needing to repeat a grade in the two following years; and
- Students exposed to shootings at their schools are less likely to graduate high school, go to college, and graduate college, and they are less likely to be employed and have lower earnings in their mid-20s.
Given the proliferation of guns in the US (I didn’t provide data on that fact, it seems to be commonly agreed to by those on both sides of the debate on guns in America – one side calls it a fetish and the other the only way to protect against tyrannical governments…); given the increase in gun deaths, mass shootings, school shootings, and school lockdown drills; and given what research tells us about the psychological effects of gun violence and lockdown drills on children; does it continue to make sense that the activity I saw in the park several days last week is still okay? Is it a good look for whoever was running the camp program (not sure if it is a HAC program or county parks program)?
In my view, it’s unfortunate that an organized educational program in 2023, even if it’s in the form of a children’s summer day camp, would choose to include in their curricular planning an activity that mimics a violent reality in this country that results in so many deaths and so much heartache, and one or which these same children are undoubtedly subjected to drills designed to teach them how to react against in the tragic event of an actual school shooter in their schools.
I think we can do better than this.
Maybe we can begin to change the gun culture in our society by thinking more
carefully about the activities in which we engage children in the name of
summer camp fun, even if those activities were ones that were mostly harmless
when my age peers and I were kids.
If you want to comment on this post, if you want to agree or respectfully disagree, I welcome the conversation. But please do so here in the blog and not Facebook. I will likely remove reactions to this post that appear on Facebook.
Until next time…
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