Ban traumatic ‘shooter drills’ in US schools, urge teachers
Unions demand end to graphic mock-ups that fuel fear among pupils as young as five
“Shooter drills”, in which masked men carrying
assault rifles burst into classrooms and simulate real-life gun attacks,
are traumatising children and should be banned, America’s two biggest
teachers’ unions have warned.
The drills came in after the Columbine shooting in 1999, where 13 students were killed, but they have surged in American schools since the attack at Sandy Hook school in 2012, when a gunman shot dead 26, mostly children in kindergarten.
“You
have kids wetting their pants, you have kids crying, you have teachers
crying and you have everyone saying, ‘this is it – I’m going to die’,”
said Lily Eskelsen García, president of the National Education
Association. “And when it’s over, it’s like – just kidding!”
Talking
to children about where to hide in the event of an intruder is one
thing, but the graphic nature of the mock-ups is putting children and
teachers in “the most frightening situations”, Eskelsen García said.
Teachers
are shot at with pellet guns and children as young as five are made to
cower silently under desks, while others are asked to lie down in
hallways covered in fake blood.
For teacher
Abbey Clements, a survivor of Sandy Hook, putting children through
terrifying “active shooter” situations – and making them think they are
real – is “obscene and perverse”.
“How
can you possibly plan for all the different horrific ways people can
carry out these mass shootings?”There are common sense things that we
can do, she said, “but to make children and teachers go through these
potentially harmful drills in the name of safety is just ludicrous”.
Now, the NET has joined forces with the American
Federation of Teachers and a leading gun-control advocacy group,
Everytown for Gun Safety, to say enough is enough.
They
are calling for an end to what they call “extreme shooter drills”,
saying they leave children traumatised, unable to focus in class, and
unable even to sleep at night. In some cases, teachers have been
physically wounded, said Eskelsen García.
Today,
95% of schools are practising shooter and lockdown drills in one form
or another. Some states, such as Florida, have passed laws making them
mandatory.
In their wake, says Eskelsen
García, a $2.7bn industry has grown up as private companies swoop in to
offer their safety training services. “Hire us and we’ll organise safety
for your school, they say – but they’re preying on the anguish of
parents and school staff and the desperate feeling that we must ‘do
something’,” she said.
But Jean-Paul
Guilbault, chief executive of the Alice Training Institute, a company
that runs shooter drills, insisted they don’t fuel fear. “Our children
are living in it, they see it all around them on the news, they go to
school every day and they are worried about it,” he said.
His
company claims to have a methodology that could save people’s lives in
“the two minutes 20 seconds from when a shot goes off to when the first
responders arrive”.
Drills did need to be
age-appropriate, he said. “But when that alarm goes off, when the panic
button is pushed, people should know how to secure a room.”
Shannon
Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America (part of
Everytown) believes active shooter drills are deflecting from the real
issue in America, of easy access to guns. “Whenever there’s a mass
shooting, the gun lobby argues that schools need to be arming teachers
and increasing the number of shooter drills,” she said. “But children
are much safer in schools than they are in their homes.”
Almost
five million American children live in homes with unlocked, loaded
guns. The focus needs to be on addressing gun violence “before it ever
gets to our schools”, she said.
Clements
understands that parents are afraid for their children whenever the
unthinkable happens – whether it’s at a school, a cinema or, a shopping
mall. “It’s a difficult situation for the schools,” she said, “because
parents are demanding to know ‘what are you doing to keep my kids
safe?’.”
But she is adamant that no one could
have done anything differently at Sandy Hook. “In a real situation, you
have no idea where the shooting is coming from”, she said. “There’s no
right or wrong thing to do – you go on instinct.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/29/teachers-call-for-ban-on-shooter-drills-in-us-schools
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