The Impact of Active Shooter Drills in Schools

School safety is a multi-billion dollar industry that we’ve created instead of passing gun safety legislation and politicians are continuing to ignore this national crisis. In interviews with Angela Ferrell-Zabala, Mia Tretta, Madeline Johnson, and Ashbey Beasley, this episode takes a deep dive into the impact of active shooter drills and how we can fight back in our own communities. 

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The Cost Of Extremism - Episode 1 Transcript

Jill: Episode 1, Active Shooter Drills. The United States experiences more school shootings than nearly all other nations across the globe. We drop our kids off at school and wonder if we're going to see them at the end of the day, or if we're going to get that dreaded phone call. That changes our lives forever. The phone call that will make us just another number and the statistics that our politicians ignore and our kids, they go to school waiting for the day that they become a target.

Maddie: My entire senior year, everybody was kind of prepared for something to happen. Everybody just felt like there was some sort of, like, evil. 

Jill: Madeline Johnson was in her senior year at Oxford High School when what felt like a normal day came to a crashing halt. She started the morning by driving her little brother to school, fighting over something she would later forget. But only hours later, Maddie would lose her best friend at the hands of a school shooter. 

Maddie: It was a normal day. Madison and I had three classes together that day. We were walking out of our AP Stats class, which we had together, and then I remember I was going to walk her to her next class. You know, we walked all the way down what we call the 200 Hallway, and I realized at some point that I was probably going to be late and that I should turn back around.

So I said goodbye to her, and the last, I guess, picture in my head that I ever have of her is her waving goodbye as I turned to start walking the other way. Right as I turned, before I could even take a step, I heard... the gunshots, which I didn't really think were gunshots at the time. The few people that were still in the hallway just kind of had this moment where everybody froze and looked around at each other, like. You know, as if to say like, is this real? Is this really happening? 

And then once we heard another round of shots, then everybody kind of went into action. There was a ringing in my ears. I could barely see, my vision was blurred. My hearing kind of went out. It almost sounded like I was underwater and people were talking about the water. I couldn't do anything but run. I ran all the way down where we had come from, out a set of doors. Um, and the whole time I was running, I could hear shots getting closer and closer behind me.

Once I got into the parking lot, I ducked behind somebody's truck and called my mom. My dad somehow got to the high school. I met my brother there and we got in my dad's car and he just took us home immediately. I remember for a while I was just sitting there and texting all my friends and checking on them. And everybody was responding except Madison, every single person. It never occurred to me in those first few hours that she could be dead. One of my close friends that I'm actually really close with now texted me and told me that she was dead and I didn't believe her. I told her like, no, that's wrong. I didn't shed a tear at first because I just, I didn't believe her. 

And then people started posting on their stories. I didn't, I don't know if I even believed it then either, but then, um, another friend who, like, she knew somebody who was a police officer or some sort of first responder, I forget, but she confirmed it, and that's kind of when it sunk in a little bit, and even then, I, I just couldn't believe it. It was the weirdest thing. I couldn't believe that, that normal day had turned into that. So that's when I found out that she had passed a few hours later. 

Jill: Four students were murdered that day in 2021, including Madeline's best friend, 17 year old Madison Baldwin. 

Maddie: I met her on the first day of my senior year. She was a transfer student, and we just clicked immediately, and we had a lot in common, and we just... became very close very quickly. She was like, probably the kindest person I've ever met. She could always tell when I was upset or, you know, when there was something that was bothering me even if I didn't say anything about it. She was just really intuitive in that way. She loved nature. She would never ever kill a bug. She would always just let it outside, which I thought was really cool. So I've started doing that now. She loved art too. She was a really, really good artist, but she also liked to make just like simple doodles. Whenever I was having a bad day, she would, I would give her a piece of gum because I always had gum with me and she would draw on the wrapper and give it back to me to make me smile. And I, I, have a lot of these wrappers still. I kept them, thankfully. 

Jill: Maddie's story isn't unique within the American school system. Like Maddie, Mia Tretta lost her best friend at the hands of a school shooter. It was 2019, and she was a freshman at Saugus High School. She'd gotten to school an hour early, as always, because she wanted to have that bit of extra time to talk to her friends before class, since the hour they had at lunch was never enough.

Mia: I walked into the quad, just like any other day, and I hugged my best friends and said hi to everyone. And I got a call from my mom. She was asking me if I could ditch school the next week to go volunteer at a homeless shelter. And I hung up, and a little less than 48 seconds later, we heard bullets. And we heard big bangs, and no one exactly knew what they were, except that it lasted only eight seconds.

And in that eight seconds, all of our lives were changed. I found myself on the ground. And when I got up, there was almost no one in the quad except for Dominic, one other girl who had been shot, and the shooter who was on the ground, who I didn't know that he was the shooter. But the quad was empty. And it's never empty. And I just knew I had to start running. I ran up two flights of stairs across campus to actually my favorite teacher's classroom, uh, my Spanish teacher. 

And that's where I sat down in my normal assigned seat that I had been sitting in all year and she knew something was wrong. A boy came up to me telling me it's gonna be okay and I said, no, you don't understand. I was shot. I went under multiple procedures to remove the bullet in my stomach and it was that night I found out that Dominic and another girl, Gracie, passed away in the shooting and that I was shot with a 45 caliber ghost gun. 

Jill: Ghost guns are un-serialized and untraceable firearms that can be bought online and assembled in under an hour, all without a background check. In 2022, Mia went to the White House to praise the Biden administration for cracking down on ghost guns, but she also used this as an opportunity to honor her best friend, Dominic Blackwell. When she spoke to me about their friendship. I could see the love radiating from her words. 

Mia: Dominic Blackwell was a bundle of joy, almost like a cartoon character. He loved Spongebob, and Reese's, and bright colors, and tie dye, and anyone who he talked to became his friend. And every single class he was in, everyone knew his name. Everyone remembered his weird jokes in the middle of class and how he wore a SpongeBob shirt almost every single day. And even like standing in the quad of our high school, everyone could know his laugh from miles away. And he just like such a bundle of joy in our community, in our school. 

Jill: We hear stories like Maddie and Mia's more often than we ever want to admit. And with each passing day, with every headline and death toll we read, it starts to become our new normal. So much so that it's normal for our kids to participate in active shooter drills multiple times a year, traumatizing them even more.

Angela: Many of us who've gone through the American public school system have seen, depending on what region of the country, there are different kinds of drills. I know I grew up in the mid Atlantic region, and so our drills happen to be fire drills. I know other folks in the West Coast, it may be an earthquake or a hurricane, tornado, those kinds of things that folks prep for. So, similar to that, it's, it's, it's set up to prepare students for something that may happen in the classroom. 

But unlike a natural disaster, this is completely preventable. And so 95% of our K-12 students are experiencing these drills in their schools. And oftentimes we're seeing that these drills are, are happening without notice to parents to fully prepare or understand. And they are something that, you know, again, we like to focus on how do we prevent these tragedies from happening in the first place instead of relying on, you know, keeping us safe by having our children almost rehearsing a tragedy that could strike. Which, as you can imagine, is super traumatizing to our children.

Jill: That was Angela Farrell-Zabala, the Executive Director of Moms Demand Action, a grassroots movement of 10 million strong across all 50 states. The organization exists to end gun violence and save lives through common sense actions and building a community of moms, teachers, survivors, gun owners, students, and everyday Americans.

Angela: Oftentimes these drills are happening without any notice or parents having any understanding that this is happening. So we don't have an opportunity or to say we don't want our children involved is this, or we want to pull them out of school knowing that this would happen. We don't have resources or don't even know, um, if this is happening to be able to have conversations with our children.

I'll tell you about a little story quickly about my five year old who came home from school one day. And that day, um, was not really eating her dinner. You know, her behavior was a little different, a little off. And I kept asking her, are you okay? And she couldn't quite find the words to say, you know, she said she's fine. She didn't want to go to bed. She woke up several times at night from bad dreams. And then, you know, I finally took her into bed with me because she just wasn't staying asleep. And, you know, we talked to the teacher the next day and asked, is everything okay? We noticed she went to school happy, and she came home and she was, uh, just not the same kid that we dropped off. 

And they did tell us that there was a drill, an actor shooter drill that happened the day before. And in her case, um, they, one of the kids that were in her class, you know, they often say, play, you know, quiet mouse. They, for young kids, they make it more of a game, which it's not. It's very traumatizing. And one of the kids was not being quiet. And so she was afraid that the bad person was going to come. And when you think about a five year old. They don't necessarily understand what is real, what's a drill and what is really happening and is that following them home? They don't know. So if you don't have notice, if they're not giving parents resources to be able to talk about this, if they're not trauma informed, frankly, then all of this really does harm our children. 

I think about the fact that some of these drills in many places that are not again, trauma informed. So it's like a simulation. So you might hear something that sounds like gunfire. You might see the doorknobs jiggling and things like that, that will really traumatize children during most drills.

Jill: Students and school staff are required to remain on lockdown in a designated area, usually in their classroom, where they go through specific emergency procedures, such as staying quiet, turning off the lights and locking the doors. In other instances, stronger actions are taken. The ALICE Training Institute is the largest for profit, private provider of active shooting training in the United States. An acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate, ALICE Training operates with a “train the trainer” model. Anyone can get certified after two days of training and online testing. Because of this, oversight is limited on a school by school basis, since instructors are able to mix in their own unfounded techniques and ideas. As of 2023, they claim to have trained over 18 million individuals and 500 school districts. ALICE is known for its more hands on approach to drills, insisting that a more quote unquote passive response will increase your chance of dying. They feature tactics such as barricading the doors with desks and distracting the shooter and fighting back with these drills often being unannounced and scarily similar to actual active shooter events. They've gone as far as advising students to throw objects at the intruders, such as books and staplers. Why should children and teachers have to be the heroes in these situations? Why can't we ensure the protection of children before we get to that point?

Angela: That is not something that our teachers have signed up for. They did not sign up for boot camp. They signed up to be educators. So, um, I do not think that they have our children in mind when they are not doing the very common sense things that would actually make a difference and save lives. 

Jill: Because there is no national standard for active shooter drill training companies to follow, we end with situations like what happened at an Indiana elementary school in 2019. The school made headlines after multiple teachers who were receiving ALICE training were shot with airsoft guns during a drill conducted by a local sheriff's office. The two were told to kneel down against a classroom wall before they were shot, without warning, with plastic pellets, leaving them with welts and bruises. On other occasions, fake blood and simulated gunfire have been used to make it more realistic for the participants, along with showing actual footage and images from previous school shootings.

It comes at a cost, too. A 2018 contract for the Hale Union School District in California shows that three years of ALICE training services cost them 32,000, which included online training and a two day “train the trainer” program. Add in the bulletproof whiteboard, transparent backpacks, and facial recognition software, and what do you get? A school safety industry worth billions of dollars. 

Angela: There is no data that shows that they prevent school shootings. What we do know is that it does feed into this 7 billion industry that is really stoking the fear of communities, parents, teachers, educators, um, which means that they're taking schools and turning them into fortresses, which are supposed to be safe places for our children.

And again, when you're talking about layers of equipment, they’re even selling like bulletproof backpacks. This is what they're focusing on or worrying about reinforced doors. We're worrying about doors, folks. We're worrying about doors, but we're not looking at the fact that we can actually prevent these tragedies from happening. We know that one of the leading causes are one of the ways that we are seeing these play out in schools is based on unsecured firearms in the home. How about, instead of worrying about the door, we think about how we can start to implement secure storage laws across our country that would actually help?

So I think we are seeing this play out and instead of investing in preventative measures, we are looking at investing in creating fortresses, making schools really feel unsafe for Children, um, and not focusing on data proven ways and solutions to addressing the real problem. 

Ashbey: My feelings on lockdown drills are that they are actively normalizing mass shootings. It's a billion dollar industry, billion dollar industry that we have created instead of passing gun safety legislation. Like we have created a billion dollar industry and school lockdowns instead of passing gun safety legislation. And that blows my mind. Billions of dollars that we could be using to feed kids, buy kids books, putting back into education. Just so much money is being spent to normalize mass shootings. 

Jill: Ashby Beasley and her son are survivors of the Highland Park shooting, so she knows firsthand what it's like to fear for her child's safety. 

Ashbey: I mean, that day started out like any other day. It was like a beautiful July 4th. The sun was shining. It had been, it was the first parade since COVID. So everyone was just in high spirits and you could feel it in the air and he didn't want to go. He was like, I want to stay home, I want to watch TV, whatever. And I was like, no, you're going to this parade. We're going to this parade. Cause I knew he was going to love it. And I knew he was going to have a good time once he was out there throwing the candy. I knew he was going to just… you know, it's so much fun to be in a parade. And so, you know, I put my mom voice on and I was like, get in the car. 

So we got in the car, we were getting ready to walk and all of a sudden, you know, shots rang out. I thought they were fireworks because I am privileged enough to not hear sounds like that and immediately think it's gunfire. They were, there was a man who screamed, “it's real, there's fatalities.” And then we realized it was a shooting. And so I grabbed my son's hand and I started running towards home. We ran into a wave of people and they were in various forms of hysterics, like wailing, screaming, crying, children's little heads were bobbling around as their parents were running with them frantically. A grown man tripped and fell with like the sickest thud, like right next to us. I mean, for a six year old to see all of this, like adults in this kind of condition, I can only imagine what that was like for him. 

And at one point, a man screamed out, the shooter is coming. And I think for my son, that was just the moment that everything for him just like broke. Because, you know, he was old enough to understand what that meant. And he thought he was going to be shot down any minute. And he was, you know, screaming, what's happening, what's happening. And then he heard that and, you know, it was very shortly after that, that he threw himself down on the ground, he laid on the ground, my arm pulled me down and he laid on the ground and he just, you know, screamed, “I don't want to die” over and over again. 

And, you know, as a mom, like, my instinct was to be like, get up, you know, like mom voice, but something inside of me told me that this was something, that this had to be different. This had to be handled differently. So I got on the floor, on the ground, and I you know face to face and said, you know, you need you have to get up. We have to keep running. We have to get to the car. We have to find dad, you know, you have to get up. 

And he did he got up and we ran, we put my son in the car, and he just screamed like the most blood curdling scream you've ever heard a person scream. And then he just collapsed. You know, he just collapsed. Like, everything, he let it all out. Think about that. 

Jill: After that traumatic event, one that would change her son forever, Ashbey had to send her son to school. Where his future isn't guaranteed, the shooter drills are. What's important to understand is that there's no research backing up the value of active shooter tools. They were created to prevent school shootings and protect students. But there's increasing evidence that these drills are harmful to the mental health of the students, while simultaneously doing nothing to protect them. Essentially, we've built an industry around further traumatizing our children, rather than passing gun safety legislation. 

Angela: We had a study that we did with Georgia Tech. And it did show that this is very traumatizing. Of course, active shooter drills, traumatizing to our children. They are growing up in a time where this is their normal, which should not be normal.

Jill: This study was conducted by Everytown in partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology Social Dynamics and Wellbeing Lab. It takes a deeper look at the immediate and long term impacts of active shooter drills on the health and well being of not only the students, but teachers and parents as well. They analyzed the social media data of 114 K-12 schools with a focus on what was being said 90 days before and after the drills occurred. The results were frightening, to say the least. 

Research found that active shooter drills in schools are associated with a 39% increase in depression, a 42% increase in stress and anxiety, and a 23% increase in psychological health problems. There was also a 22% increase in concerns over death in not only students, some as young as five years old, but teachers and parents as well. So while active shooter drills are continuously being pushed in order to prevent further gun regulations, the long term impact on schools and the wider community is being ignored.

Maddie: We implemented a program called ALICE in our school. That's when it became more clear that, you know, this was something that was a possibility, and that's when it became more scary, too. We would go over the ALICE training and what to do, and they would give us different scenarios, like, Oh, like, the shooter is across the entire building. Like, what do you do? And they would make us plan out these scenarios in our head so that we could take the situation, evaluate it, and then decide what the best option was. 

So that's, that was kind of scary too, because, you know, it was like they were putting all these ideas in our heads and. You know, then I did start to think about it. I was like, Oh, well, what if this, this and this happened? What would I do at that point? You know? And so I did think about it a lot. My friends and I thought about it a lot, but I don't think we ever truly thought that something like that would happen. And if we did, I don't think we understood. The effect it would have on our lives.

Mia: For me personally, and obviously I can only personally speak about myself, I don't think they necessarily did cause anxiety for me before the shooting, but now that the shooting has happened, it definitely has. I've talked to all of my admins and administrators saying that I need this notice beforehand. And that's what I’m going to continue to ask for, because it's such a reminder of what happened to me. I think what's a lot worse of a feeling is knowing that your lawmakers are not doing anything about gun violence, and that's why you have to have these drills. 

Mia: The lawmakers put these drills in place because they know the policy stuff is not working. They know that until they ban assault weapons, until they make stricter background checks and red flag laws and make sure that people can't be open carrying anywhere they want, this is gonna keep happening, shootings are gonna keep happening, people are gonna keep dying, and you're gonna need those drills. So I think that's the sadder reality, is that the lawmakers aren’t doing their jobs and we have to see it happening and get reminded when we have those drills.

Jill: And where does this leave our kids? We're forcing students who have already gone through hell to fight for themselves. Because nothing is being done to protect them. 

Mia: I knew I wanted to honor myself and honor Dominic in a bigger way.

Jill:  Since that day, when Mia was shot and lost her best friend, she has gone on to partner with organizations and make her voice heard, speaking out about gun violence and ghost guns. 

Mia: We need ghost gun laws passed at different local levels, and then state levels, and then obviously at the federal level, when I spoke and introduced President Biden at the Federal ghost gun regulation.

Jill: For Maddie, her activism was also a form of healing.

Maddie: I didn't really love the idea of activism at first because everything for those few months after, I felt like everything was about me and what I had lost. It wasn't that I was trying to be selfish, I just felt like I was one of the only people in the world that had experienced something like that, which wasn't true at all. And I just kind of felt like, why would I get involved in something if I can't have her back? And, you know, what, like, what is this going to solve? Because she's never going to come back. But then I started to get involved a little bit and I realized that... it was a little bit healing for me because it kind of felt like if I couldn't have her back, avenging her was the next best thing.

Jill: Maddie has since become vice president of the student-led organization No Future Without Today, which pushes for safe storage laws, universal background checks, and extreme risk protection. 

Angela: You know, there's a lot of damage that's being done, a lot of trauma in the communities. We think about depression and we think about anxiety, folks not feeling safe, which is unacceptable. And as a mom, it frankly pisses me off to understand that my children could be in a situation where they are constantly retraumatized over and over again when there are simple solutions that we could that would really help. So I hear that time and time again across the country and working closely with our Students Demand Action leaders that are fed up.

But the good news is that those leaders and when you see people like our young students that have gone from elementary all the way through college, having to go through drills or have lost someone because of the daily gun violence in their community, or have themselves been on lockdown or experience a school shooting, what you do is you are creating more activists, more organizers, more advocates that are going to push back and say this is absolutely unacceptable. 

Jill: These are the students that are most impacted by gun violence, and they know that active shooter drills aren't the answer. They're fighting for more than just putting band aids on issues that go deeper than our politicians want to admit. If we want to find solutions, we have to look towards the people that are tirelessly fighting in honor of the people they've lost from gun violence. What do survivors want? 

Mia: Students want change. We want to see lawmakers in Congress, in the Senate, in their local state government, making change. They want to see them banning assault weapons. They want to see them putting taxes on ammunition. They want to see that gun owners need to carry insurance. They want to see that you can't just walk into a Walmart with a firearm. That is what students want. People are scared to go to school because of these firearms, and that's not fair. It's not fair that we have to deal with it and can't do anything about it.

So many of these kids, when I was shot, I couldn't vote. I couldn't do any of these bigger change moments. So if you can, you need to use that power. Use the power to vote. Use the power to talk to one another. Tell them my story. Tell them other people's stories. Tell them about how you are scared to send your grandchild, your daughter, to school because of these firearms.

I don't know why some of these politicians think that they're untouchable, but they are not immune. Nobody is immune. Gun violence can affect anybody. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do or what you stand for. It's a possibility. It might happen to you. And that should make people angrier than it does. So I want every adult in this country to imagine what it would be like to live without their child, you know, imagine what it's like for these parents who have lost children. You know, step up and fight because children are worth it. Lives are worth it. I think that any single life in this country is worth more than every single gun that we have. I think people need to start valuing human lives over inanimate objects. That's really what it comes down to. 

Ashbey: We need to cut off the easy access. It's too easy for people to be able to buy these weapons. They can buy them without a background check. And they, we see them consistently being used. In mass shootings because they are weapons of war that were designed to kill as many people as possible. That's sort of been my mission since that, since the shooting is just to make sure that we are cutting off the access of these weapons to people who will use them to hunt civilians, hunt, you know, people. And, you know, we shouldn't be afraid to go to the supermarket or go send our kids to school. And, um, You know, I think this is logical. It's reasonable. We did it before. We banned assault weapons before. So that's pretty much how I've been coping is by fighting and just being, you know, relentless at, you know, showing up and saying, this needs to happen. We need change. We need change now. 

Angela: We should not have our children prepared to put tourniquets on each other because of an active shooter. What we should do is make sure that we have strong secure storage laws that we are reinstating assault weapons ban that we are not allowing these. Weapons of war on our streets, and we're not having young people access to these firearms.  

Ashbey: Gun violence is everywhere. It permeates every corner of society, and it affects every single one of us. And just because it hasn't affected you yet, it's just a matter of time until it does. Till it affects someone you love, till it's your child, till it's your husband, till it's you. But like, gun violence is, it's, it's everywhere. It's everywhere. And, you know, there is just, it's going to take all of us. And at some point there will be a turning point in this country that I know is coming, and I don't think it's far away, where, you know, right now, 50% of Americans have experienced gun violence or know someone who has experienced gun violence. And it's only a matter of time until that's going to be 100%. 

Jill: Let's not let extremists decide that turning point for us. We need to be proactive in this fight. So what can we do? A good place to start is by supporting organizations like Red Wine and Blue, where you can find the tools and resources to learn how to fight against extremism in your own community. With these simple actions, we can get closer to the safe future that we deserve.