School drills under prepare students for crisis

Students recreate a lock-down drill in a darkened classroom (Photo: Annika Umholtz, The Puma Prensa)

By Annika Umholtz, staff writer

It’s impossible to ever be truly prepared for disastrous events. The 2019 California Kincade fire, the earthquakes that sprout from the Rodgers Creek fault line that runs straight through Santa Rosa, and school shootings that gained infamy as early as the 1999 Columbine shooting—all are testament to the dangers students face. They’ve all left their marks on California students. Maria Carrillo High School, too, does its best to be ready for these worst-case scenarios, but we can do even better. 

The California Education Code (EC) currently requires schools to conduct both earthquake drills and fire drills regularly. However, existing laws do not require training for other types of threats. Any additional drills such as lockdown, shelter-in-place, or multi-option response drills are organized of the school’s own volition. As of 2019, Senate Bill 541 was signed into law requiring the California Department of Education (CDE) to gather data about the lockdown and multi-option response drills from a random sample of schools from grades one through twelve. So despite few drills being mandatory, the CDE has used the information they have collected to create detailed recommendations schools can follow when practicing additional safety drills.  Scott Wallach, social science teacher and former ASB adviser, recently shared with the Prensa what Carrillo does to prepare. He said the drills are just as much for the staff as they are for the students because every staff member on campus has a role to play during an emergency. Wallach is in charge of the supply team, and other groups are in charge of keeping track of students or searching for missing people. Despite their importance, these jobs are often under-practiced due to time restrictions and working around the academic schedule. 

“Training happens once in a while. We haven’t had any official training in a number of years. There was a training in the library once about what to do for a shooting, and we also have to be CPR certified, but there’s not a ton of official training,” said Wallach. He explained that the admin simply hopes that large-scale emergencies don’t happen since the staff are only really prepared for mundane emergencies like small fires, earthquakes or suspicious people in the neighborhood. “The more common emergencies we are prepared for, and that’s true for most schools. We’re not first responders. That’s not what we do on a day to day basis,” Wallach concludes. 

Despite the Carrillo staffs’ lack of training, they do what they can to protect the school.  But that doesn’t change the fact that students still feel uncertain when asked if they would know the right thing to do under dangerous circumstances. “I feel more secure with information I’ve consumed from online and from past survivors than I do with things like school preparation,” said senior Jocelyn Alvarez. She recalls once hearing a shooting survivor express that they think they would have died if they had stayed in the classroom, while school drills only teach kids how to shelter in place. If this is all we know how to do, what happens when there’s an intruder in the classroom? What do we do if the path to the field is blocked? What can we do when the situation deviates even slightly from a controlled drill? 

Hearing a survivor tell you to run and a school tell you to hide—this contradictory information from two different trustworthy sources makes it tough to make quick decisions when you need to. 

Many hypothetical scenarios exist when it comes to emergencies. “The situation itself could be different, we never know,” senior Cody Peters adds, concerned about how vague the drills often are. At Carrillo, the lockdown drills encompass a variety of situations from danger in the neighborhood to an active shooter. It’s in preparation for cases like this that—while not mandatory—the CDE recommends schools try to include multi-option response drills which cover more possible actions students can take to survive depending on different situations. Based on the nature of the emergency, staff members determine the best possible response such as lockdown, evacuations, escape, drop-cover-hold, or any other strategy. But, the CDE does not specify how to simulate all of these actions and simply leaves it to the schools to teach all these different methods. Therefore, it becomes the school’s responsibility to address practicing the various possible responses and informing students when each action is the best option. 

However, the quality of implementation would vary from classroom to classroom. “It's usually up to individual teachers to explain the drill, so all of them explain it differently, every year it’s been different,” Alvarez said.

In order to combat this issue, it’s important to standardize what information needs to be shared during these drills. To take some of the weight off of teachers’ shoulders, it could be helpful to record a detailed video covering the important instructions that should be repeated during every drill and then allow students to ask any questions that remain. This informational recording could be directed by Assistant Principal Randy Burbank, who is currently in charge of school safety, or the Santa Rosa City Schools District’s Board of Education could regulate what gets presented in said video for all schools in the area instead of just applying it to Maria Carrillo. Either way, all students deserve the same level of drill preparation. 

Social science teacher Jeff Hitchcock took the students’ concerns to heart. Following the “better safe than sorry” policy, he begins drills by reviewing the rules of Run, Hide, and Fight. He even discusses strategies and specific location advantages his classroom has with his students. In response to this, Hitchcock’s classes always give positive feedback in regards to his straightforward approach. “He went more in depth while other teachers just say we have a drill and then nothing else,” said Alvarez who attended his class last year. 

While many students are satisfied with detailed approaches like this, these more explicit conversations also lead some to be concerned, fearing that they create unnecessary feelings of panic among students as the drills stress out kids who are unlikely to ever actually experience a serious threat at school. “Despite their proliferation in schools across the United States, the impact of lockdown drills on students remains largely understudied,” the CDE admits. There does not seem to be any concrete data to support or deny these claims that school drills are causing kids to be mentally drained, but students are already conveying distress with or without drills present. “Some kids would take their plastic bags, create air pockets and then stomp on them—it sounded like it was a gun. Everyone would pause like they didn’t know what to do. It was just a joke, but for a second it was scary. I’d grown up hearing about school shootings so I -figured now was the time,” said senior Grace Zucco.

Since 2020 alone, there have already been 702 school shootings across the United States. Based on the sources used by the National Center for Education Statistics, school shooting rates have been on the rise for a number of years. There were 114 school shootings in 2020, 250 school shootings in 2021, 303 school shootings in 2022, and there have already been 35 school shootings in 2023 even though it’s still only the beginning of the year. Students may have become used to living in a world full of danger, but that doesn’t mean this danger is no longer threatening. 

Kids aren’t worried because of school drills, they’re worried because of real, current dangers. With school shootings and natural disasters always looming over our heads, now more than ever it’s important that we give students a fighting chance.