Experts say efficiency of school lockdown drills are hard to quantify

Earlier this week a map was discovered online with what appeared to be a detailed plan for a shooting Holy Cross high school in Saskatoon.

Since then, the police have arrested a 16-year-old-boy in connection, but the threat has sparked discussion in the city surrounding school lockdown drills.

Some people want schools to be as prepared as possible while others believe these drills add too much unnecessary anxiety for students.

Communications consultant for Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools, Derrick Kunz, says lockdown drills are part of their safety and emergency preparedness protocol in collaboration with the city’s police and fire departments.

“We have two broad categories of things that we prepare for—a perimeter lockdown and a school lockdown,” he said. “Research indicates we need to be prepared for things so that people can respond appropriately, it helps educate people about how to respond and possible scenarios for that. It is a bit of a balancing act about not raising alarm but being prepared in today’s day and age where threats at the schools are unfortunate realities in some of our communities, even in Saskatchewan.”

These drills can cover a variety of scenarios like unknown people entering schools as well as a school shooting scenario. However, the actual effectiveness of these drills is a difficult thing to study.

“We don’t have any data, it’s something that is very difficult to quantify and to study because they are very statistically rare events. So it’s very difficult to know exactly what lockdown drills or lockdown procedures or an active shooter response procedure’s effect is,” said Amanda Klinger, director of operations for the Educator’s School Safety Network in the U.S.

“Any given teacher is much more likely to deal with an environmental event, a fire, a person who is in the school and we are not really sure who they are or where they are supposed to be. Those things happen all the time. So we are always recommending that people do prepare for that worst case scenario active shooter event but that that preparation is put in context of a larger comprehensive approach,” she explained

Because of the reactionary nature of these drills, Klinger also advocates for schools to take preventative threat assessment measures too.

“I think an important foundational question to think about is how effective is a lockdown drill to help me prevent violence? It’s precisely zero per cent effective. The preparations we do for responding to an active shooter event do nothing to help us to prevent the root cause,” she said. “We really advocate for schools to look at these concerns from both sides. So we do need to have policies and procedures in place so we know what would we do as a response if these things happen but we also need to spend an equal amount of time working on the preventative side.”

She says studies have shown schools that have implemented threat assessment techniques have a better climate and culture.

Saskatoon’s schools currently do lock down drills twice a year.