Transcript: Session 2A: Reducing Stress and Trauma by Normalizing School Safety Practices

Antoinette Miller:

So once again, good afternoon. My name is Antoinette Miller. Welcome to this session on Reducing Stress and Trauma by Normalizing School Safety Practices. I serve as a technical assistance provider for the California Center for School Climate and a program associate with WestEd. I’ll be your moderator for this session. I hope that you were all able to attend our keynote this morning on one of the morning sessions and the wellness break. Also, just want to remind you to take care of yourself during this session and prioritize your wellness.

So before we get started with our session, I want to share a quick note about the California Center for School Climate. The California Center for School Climate is a California Department of Education initiative led by WestEd. We provide free support and trainings on school climate and data use to local education agencies in California. We invite you to visit our website, ccsc.wested.org, to learn more about the supports the center provides to districts and schools across the state. So when we think about school safety, we are not just thinking about physical safety, we’re also thinking about psychological and emotional safety, for example.

Our shift in transforming school climate also involves school safety practices. So now I would like to introduce our guest speakers for this session. Please welcome Shawna White, senior school safety lead in WestEd’s Justice and Prevention Research Center. Dr. White brings a decade of experience leading research and technical assistance projects at local, state, and federal levels. She currently leads projects related to school emergency management and critical incident response, behavioral threat assessment implementation, and general school safety technical assistance.

Prior to WestEd, Dr. White served as Associate Director of Research and Evaluation at the Texas School Safety Center. Our second speaker is Jeff Caldwell, senior lead in school safety in WestEd’s Justice and Prevention Research Center. In this role, Jeff works with state entities and school districts to provide technical assistance and resources related to school safety. He’s the former Associate Director of School Safety Readiness at the Texas School Safety Center, where he was involved in creation, implementation, and administration of statewide initiatives for school safety. With that, I will pass it to Shawna.

Shawna White:

Thank you for that introduction, Antoinette, and welcome everyone. Thank you all for joining us today. Before we dive in, I want to provide some context around the topic we’re discussing today. We’ll be covering information related to various school safety drills and practices, including variations of lockdown drills, and we also make several references to active shooter scenarios and events. Some of this material may be sensitive or even triggering for some members of the audience. I want to encourage you to be mindful of taking care of yourself. If you feel the need to step away for a moment, please do so.

We’ll be here when you come back. If you decide not to come back and rejoin, we totally understand. So I just want to offer that up front and center so we don’t take anyone by surprise. The reason, though, that we feel it’s important to discuss this topic is that schools are required to conduct certain safety drills. In California specifically, schools are required to have building disaster plans, and they’re required to practice the procedures that are outlined in those plans. In other words, they’re required to conduct safety drills related to disasters or emergencies. Now, we know that we can’t eliminate all the trauma associated with experiencing a real-life emergency situation.

Depending on the nature and severity of the emergency, there’s a high likelihood that those exposed to the emergency will experience some degree of trauma. However, that doesn’t mean that planning and drilling to prepare for emergency situations has to be trauma-inducing. So what we’re hoping to achieve here today is providing the audience with general information about drills and to offer some ideas around how to conduct safety drills to make sure staff and students acquire the knowledge and the skills needed to respond in the event of an actual emergency while minimizing the potential for undue stress or trauma related to the drill.

So first, let’s talk generally about the purpose of school safety drills. Drills are primarily intended to create muscle memory. Schools conduct drills so that students and staff build muscle memory around the actions they should take during different types of emergencies. Building that muscle memory helps everyone in the school respond to an emergency more quickly, and familiarity with the response actions can reduce anxiety. I also want to note that drills are also an important opportunity for schools to test their procedures and make adjustments to those procedures if they need to for a more efficient or effective response.

The more schools practice drills, the better prepared they are to respond appropriately, confidently, and safely in the event of an actual emergency. So they’re a vital part of emergency preparation. But a question that comes up around drills is whether a drill should be conducted using an actual emergency scenario. Does applying an emergency scenario to a drill make the drill more anxiety-inducing? So, Jeff, I’m going to turn it over to you to offer your thoughts on scenario-based drills.

Jeff Caldwell:

Yea thanks, Shawna. I’d say, first of all, scenarios in and of themselves are really not good or bad. For example, anytime we do a fire drill, just the name of the drill has created a scenario that we’re using for that drill. So there’s not really an issue using a scenario, and really, in many cases, this is necessary to define the drill and the actions to be taken.

For example, there’s really two basic reasons why a school would conduct a shelter drill. One would be for severe weather, and the other would be for some type of hazardous materials incident. And those two incidents require very different actions, and therefore, it is necessary really to know what scenario we’re drilling or practicing to be able to get those actions correct.

Shawna White:

Yeah. Okay. So the scenario can be really important to contextualize the drill and can help everyone understand when and why they would take specific actions. So that all makes sense, but what’s the difference between what you just described and the types of scenario-based drills we often see highlighted in the news?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, that’s a great question, and some really important distinctions. So I think what we typically hear about in the news are more, what I would say, intense scenario-based drills where someone has really expanded the drill into a functional or full-scale exercise. So in the world of emergency management, drills are really just one form of exercise that can be conducted. In the school-based setting, I think it’s actually helpful to consider drills as a separate category. Drills are what most people in the school-based setting are familiar with and what we commonly practice in the school-based setting.

So really, in that context, drills versus more advanced types of exercises require very different preparation and planning as well as different training and skill sets. So a drill is really a basic low-pressure way to learn an action to take during an emergency. So the traditional fire drill is a great example. The fire alarm goes off, everyone lines up, exits the building using a predetermined route. The goal is really basically to see how long it takes to get everyone lined up and out of the building in an orderly fashion. And we also want to ensure that everyone’s accounted for and that they become familiar with the routes.

It’s not necessary to go into graphic detail about what the scenario is or to add additional complexities in order to conduct a drill. For example, we don’t have to say, “We’re conducting a fire drill and your classroom’s on fire. Two students have third-degree burns, and one is gone unconscious from smoke inhalation.” None of that information really adds to our ability to perform the muscle memory-type actions that we need to learn, and it really doesn’t have anything to do with the tasks associated with the fire drill. It does certainly intensify the scenario, and it can actually create stress and potentially trauma just in the actions of the drill.

So adding in these types of details, it really begins to move the situation from a drill to a more advanced type of exercise. Now, an exercise can range from even just a tabletop discussion where there’s a scenario that adds detail, requires some decision-making, and has changing variables up to a full-scale exercise where there are actors portraying, say, injured victims, maybe active shooters, and they require participants to make real-time decisions as to how to handle each variable in that situation.

Shawna White:

So Jeff, many of the incidents we see highlighted in the news do portray an active shooter scenario. These scenarios are attempts to make lockdown drills more realistic. A basic lockdown drill practices, as you said, low-pressure actions. You make the lockdown announcement, staff secure their rooms by locking the doors and turning out the lights, and everyone moves to a safe area inside the room to sit quietly.

What we see in the news, though, often involves things like fake blood, some type of non-lethal ammunition, shooting blanks, or even plastic pellets. So these aren’t simply scenario-based lockdown drills. These are moving more into the realm of exercises. What are your thoughts on these types of lockdown exercises?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, I think, in these situations, they’re really kind of misguided attempts to show what happens during a scenario. There really has to be a balance between preparing people to act and traumatizing them with too much immersion too quickly. As an example, in law enforcement, there’s actually very good training that uses actors to act out simulated real-life situations of active shooters in schools where law enforcement must respond, and this uses paint pellets, real-time, real-life scenarios to help officers learn what to do.

However, the distinction here is that these are highly trained individuals that have already spent hours and hours learning the skills needed to make these types of decisions. For police officers, there’s a lot of training that happens long before they’re put in the actual scenarios, and those are still pretty stressful. But without the training and experience, most would be very overwhelmed. And so to put untrained people in that type of exercise really doesn’t help them to learn to react better. Instead, it just likely overwhelms it.

Shawna White:

Could you give a practical example, Jeff, something outside the topic of drills to illustrate this balance between preparing versus traumatizing and how that relates to drills?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah. One of the real-world examples I use sometimes when I’m talking to people is when we’re trying to teach kids to drive, we don’t simply put them behind the wheel on the interstate and let them see what they can do. We work from simple basic experiences to more advanced ones. So, often, this starts with things, maybe even like video games, riding lawnmowers, go-karts, or other utility vehicles.

Once they do start driving a car, we usually start them out in parking lots and slower-speed streets just to get the feel of driving and the decision-making required, and then, eventually, over time and with experience, we work them up to traveling on the interstate. So if we were ever going to involve students in more advanced exercises, we’d have to have a similar approach. Really, the idea is that you train first, and then you conduct drills to determine if that training can be implemented in the way it was intended.

Drills should test some very basic skills, but what those are and where we draw the line depends on where the students we’re serving are in their training and development of the particular skill set. The school-based example would be just in order for students to be able to accomplish higher-level or more complex math problems. They first have to develop the skill sets needed to support that task. And so another way to think about this is when we’re put in a stressful situation, we tend to have a fight, flight, or freeze response, and these are immediate actions that our body and mind take when they don’t know what to do in a given situation.

The muscle memory we’re attempting to create with training and drills is intended to stop or mitigate that fight, flight, or freeze response instead of immediately being overwhelmed, we’re trying to teach what to do so someone’s not trying to figure that out in the heat of the moment under pressure, and when we do this, we actually reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed. And how much training we have and how much we practice to gain the confidence in our abilities that will then dictate how complex of a situation we can handle without becoming overwhelmed.

Shawna White:

So is there a way for schools, if they were inclined to do so, to take a basic lockdown drill a bit further without traumatizing participants, and what are your thoughts on doing that?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, sure. I mean, there’s ways to inject some variables into drills and still keep them pretty low-pressure. So some schools are already doing some of this, or they may take a hybrid approach. It’s still focused on basic actions but add some additional challenges without taking the incident to a more advanced exercise. For example, maybe everyone remains in lockdown until an administrator or first responder, if they’re participating in the drill, unlocks the room and releases them.

Or it could be that people are practicing for a lockdown in areas other than the classroom, such as a library or a cafeteria. This would really work for other drills as well. So, for instance, in a fire drill, we may add a new variable where we require everyone to assume that their primary routes are blocked and they need to use a secondary route, which is also a known and pre-planned route. These are still low-pressure variables that are focused on the actions to be taken.

Was everyone able to utilize their alternate route in the fire drill and not have it drastically impact the time needed for evacuation? Or, in the lockdown drill, were all the door locks working? Did the admin or first responders have keys needed to release everyone, and did everyone understand where the safe spots or safe areas were located, including an area such as the library or the cafeteria? Again, this is really to test what we know or what we should know, not to traumatize us with a situation we don’t know how to handle or what to do.

Shawna White:

Yeah. This is all great information and great advice, Jeff, and so far, we’ve sort of covered drill practices in general. I want to get a little more specific now and start talking about tailoring drills to be appropriate for the participants who are involved in the drill.

In line with best practice, safety drills should be conducted in a manner that’s developmentally appropriate. Developmental appropriateness includes both how we implement drills as well as how we talk to different students about drills. What are some considerations for ensuring drill practices are developmentally appropriate?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, that’s a great question. This is a really, really important aspect of conducting drills. There, again, needs to be a balance between preparing versus scaring or traumatizing. So what you talk about with high school students may not be appropriate for elementary students.

For example, in high school, you might give a really thorough explanation about why we’re conducting a particular drill, whereas in elementary school, the explanation itself may be too much, and it’s more important to simply walk them through the actions so they begin to create muscle memory. As we discussed a few minutes ago, this is really to test what we know, and it would be reasonable to expect that a high school student that has done fire drills for many years would have more information and could handle more detail than a kindergarten student, for example.

Shawna White:

Right. Yeah. So younger students don’t necessarily need an explanation that they’re practicing an evacuation drill because the school building could catch on fire someday. That’s too much information for them. They just need clear, concrete instructions on how to line up quickly and to follow their teacher to exit the building.

Jeff Caldwell:

Right. For instance, in training for lockdown at the high school level, it may actually be appropriate to discuss injuries that may occur and how to treat them if they’re ready for that information and developing that skill set needed. Many high schools require some of that training in different states. However, in elementary school, those concepts may be way too much for the kids to comprehend and may be scary for them to even just hear about.

Another way to think about all this again is drills are a test of what we learned about what to do in a given situation, and this is really no different than what’s done in school. For the most part, you teach first, and then you test. The process for drills is the same. We give everyone information about what to do and then conduct a drill, which is the test to ensure they understand and can accomplish the tasks. If there’s a good foundation in what we know based on the test, then it may be possible to add in some additional variables, like we’ve discussed.

Shawna White:

So that’s really helpful regarding how we talk about drills with different students. What about developmental appropriateness for actually implementing drills?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah. So when planning for and conducting a drill, there will be different expectations and capabilities for different age levels. For example, really, when drilling for a hazardous material incident, a high school class could be trained and then be able to assist with securing a room by covering vents and windows and generally being able to help the teacher. On the other hand, that level of participation may not be appropriate for younger kids or even possible.

Ultimately, it’s really about knowing your school and your students and staff and ensuring that they’ve been trained to accomplish the task that the drill is testing for. It’s also important to know if a school has experienced recent traumatic events or even if there’s been events in the news, that those can all play a part in knowing how much participation and what type of discussion is appropriate no matter the age of development. Another factor that’s really easy to overlook or to miss is we may not be aware of trauma or incidents occurring in each individual student’s life that may impact how they react or handle a drill.

Shawna White:

Yeah. So essentially, at the end of the day, there’s potential for some trauma even during drills. So how can schools minimize that potential for trauma and still provide everyone with the knowledge and the skills needed in emergency situations?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, this is something I’ve really advocated for in schools that I’ve worked with. One of the ways to make drills less traumatic it’s really to begin to incorporate some of what needs to be done into everyday school life. It’s kind of like the example of buckling up. We don’t make a big deal about putting on a seatbelt by discussing all the horrible things that may happen if you don’t wear the seatbelt. We just incorporate buckling up into a normal routine of getting into the car to go somewhere.

So some might argue that this may desensitize people, and I think it’s really important to make the distinction that training people to take action instead of responding by fight, flight, or freeze is not the same as desensitizing them to the tragic outcomes that occur during events. The goal is really to incorporate actions that mimic what we would do so that when the time comes to accomplish the task, we’re prepared, and we don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining or trying to formulate a plan of actions. It’s really not far-fetched to begin to incorporate many of these tasks into daily activities, which may, in turn, reduce the amount of stress or trauma when we’re drilling or even during a real event.

Shawna White:

Yeah, I agree, Jeff. I don’t think this is a far-fetched notion, but I also don’t think that it’s common knowledge or that it’s common practice. So let’s dive into this concept a bit deeper. Can you start by focusing on how you could use daily activities inside a classroom to reduce trauma during a drill?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah. Here, again, this would be different at different age levels, but let’s use a lockdown drill with young students as an example. So in a lockdown drill, the teacher locks the classroom door, turns out the lights, and everyone moves to a predetermined safe spot inside the room to sit quietly. Young students, they often have a place where they will congregate on the floor for storytime or other learning activities. So planning out a classroom so that this storytime area or congregation area is the same location as the safe spot we would go to during a lockdown drill can help create familiarity that can be beneficial and useful when it’s time to conduct a drill or even in a real scenario.

There may be an opportunity to even include some quiet time while in this area to incorporate the drill action of being quiet. And doing this repeatedly without the inducement of stress like in a traditional drill, so just doing it in an ordinary school day throughout the year can help us feel less stress when it’s time to actually do the drill or even in a real event. So then, during a drill or emergency, instead of trying to give instructions to go to a particular spot in the room that might’ve only been used a few times a year for a drill, we can now give instructions that students are familiar with on a daily basis. “Class, we’re conducting a lockdown drill. I need everyone to go to the location on the floor where we have storytime.

Instead of storytime right now, we’re doing a drill, so we’re going to turn out the lights and be very quiet just like we’ve been practicing, and it’s important for us to stay quiet until the drill is over.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this is some pie-in-the-sky perfect methodology, but it gives us and the students a better chance for the drill in an actual emergency to be easier to understand and to perform and for it to be less anxiety-provoking. Now, this requires some planning for room layout and use, taking into consideration conducting drills and the possibility of real events.

Shawna White:

Yeah, I’m glad you pointed that out, Jeff. It’s really important for administrators and staff to understand that they would need to work and plan together in advance to be able to implement this type of strategy.

But if they use this type of strategy, I think it could really go a long way toward reducing anxiety and trauma for students, and I think it would also alleviate stress on teachers who may feel uncomfortable doing certain drills. I think the more routine we can make drill actions, the more comfortable everyone feels, and ultimately, the more effectively everyone can learn and carry out the response actions needed during emergencies. So, Jeff, these concepts are great for younger students. What do you suggest for older students?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, first of all, for older students, it may be appropriate to even just have more direct conversations about drills and even real events. I will say my experience is that often discussions about real events, particularly when you see them in the media, are often singularly focused on the deaths and injuries that occurred in events. One thing to consider discussing with older students is the outcome when drill actions are followed.

For example, when researching school shootings that have occurred, I’ve not been able to find an incident where a single locked classroom door was breached, and even in the report put out by the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, they stated that the testimony and other evidence presented to the commission, it would reveal that there has never been an event in which an active shooter breached a locked classroom door.

So there’ve been unlocked classrooms that were entered, and in one incident, a glass panel next to a locked door was broken, and entry was made through the window, but not a locked classroom door. So one of the things with older students is just providing that type of information about the importance of things like locked classroom doors. That may help emphasize the importance of why we do the emergency drills and the importance of knowing what actions to take.

Focusing on what students can do and how to take action can empower them with a sense of self-efficacy that can help reduce trauma. So older students can grasp these concepts, and they can ultimately react differently than younger students. With older students, it also may still be possible to set up a classroom so that an area can serve dual purposes and create familiarity with actions that may be taken during a drill, such as maybe a reading area that’s also utilizes the safe spot for a lockdown. So there can be some similarities as well.

Shawna White:

Yeah, I really like the idea of empowering our students with this kind of knowledge and confidence. I agree that much of the focus is often placed on severe incidents where things have gone wrong, which is important for us to be able to learn from and to be able to do better. But we often don’t get around to talking about what does work or talking about situations where things went right.

So I think that it’s really important to emphasize with older students what does work and the things they can do to help make a difference. So those are great ideas for activities inside the classroom. Are there other ways to incorporate drill actions into daily activities at school?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, sure, and this can really apply to students at all levels. So you can consider incorporating the use of things like alternate routes to and from daily activities that may be used during drills and emergencies. For example, we might go to the library using the route we would use to seek shelter during severe weather or that we would use as an alternate or secondary fire exit route. When we’re able to incorporate these things into daily routines, then there’s less panic to remember what to do when there is a drill or emergency.

Instead of having to recall an entirely different route that only gets used once or twice a year, we can simply say, “We’re going to exit the building this time going the way we go to the library.” In upper grades where students don’t necessarily travel in class groups, it may require more thought about how to bring these concepts up on a more regular basis. One thought that I’ve talked with schools about is using emergency response concepts as extra credit questions on tests. For example, where is the emergency severe weather shelter located, or where are the AED units located? Perhaps even maybe having some type of a scavenger hunt to locate items such as an AED medical kits or the storm shelter.

Shawna White:

Yeah, that’s really creative, Jeff. Can we take just another minute here and go a little bit more in detail about how to implement this type of strategy at different grade levels?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, I would say there’s really no limit to how you can engage students in understanding the information and doing actions that become more common so that when we’re needed in a drill or an actual emergency, they’re a lot less of an unknown or less difficult. It does require some additional planning and preparation, but it can yield tremendous benefits. So, as a reminder, at lower grade levels, it may not be necessary to have a detailed discussion about why we’re doing things differently.

They just become part of the daily activities and then reinforce during drills. So we take a route to the library that passes the storm shelter so the students become familiar with that route. Then, when discussing the shelter for weather drill, it’ll be easier to explain that when we line up and go to the shelter area, it’ll be the same way we go to the library. When you get into some of the middle-grade levels, it actually may be appropriate to begin to give a little bit more information.

So, for example, to incorporate fire drill exits, it may be that every time we go to the library, we point out that should we ever need it, this is the alternate route we would take in the event that during a fire, our primary route was blocked, and as part of the explanation, we would maybe show which exit doors we would take with the secondary route and discuss where we would go maybe to meet up if that’s different from our primary place where we do during our regular fire drill.

In an upper grade, where students are less likely to move around as a class, again, it may be appropriate to have review discussions about locations such as the shelters and assembly points, and even secondary fire routes, and it still may be appropriate at certain times to walk the routes and point out shelters and exits if you do move as a class.

Shawna White:

Yeah. And as I mentioned before, this repetition benefits teachers as much as it does students. Walking evacuation routes more frequently developing test questions around emergency response actions, all of these types of activities further ingrain the information for the teachers as well so that they’re better prepared and less anxious about drills.

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this goes directly to the quote that we have on the slide here. Just incorporating these actions into daily life also makes them more accessible for us as adults. When we’re trying to manage a drill or an emergency, the best thing we can do to help reduce trauma is to prepare ourselves. Realistically, if we remain calm and so that we know what to do and can provide clear instructions and information, that goes a long way in helping our students to remain calm and to be able to listen and follow instructions.

Now, this underscores the importance of training for staff and teachers. As difficult as it is to find time to train on these topics, it’s really extremely important. It’s also important that the training be meaningful and relevant. So this goes back to what we discussed earlier about teaching and testing. Adults, just like students, need to know and understand the information before they’re being tested on.

Shawna White:

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so before we wrap up, Jeff, I want to get your thoughts on one other area. Some news articles have discussed parents keeping students out of school on drill days to prevent them from experiencing possible trauma. If a parent asked you whether they should keep their student home or send them to school on a drill day, what would you say to them?

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, so there have been a lot of news articles highlighting this, and actually I’ve personally spoken to numerous parents who feel like they don’t want their kids to be traumatized, so they take them out of school on days when drills are being conducted. The hard part, and I think it’s a really important part, is as a parent, we don’t want anything bad to happen to our kids, but the truth is that while we may be able to separate them from the planned drill, we are often not able to separate them from the actual event. So we can maybe separate them from the drill, but we can’t separate them from the life actions that happen when we’re not around.

So this talk usually centers around lockdown drills dealing with active shooters, but it’s important for other drills as well, such as fire and severe weather. When actual events occur, it’s important for our kids to be as prepared as they can for how to handle the situation. Keeping kids out of school on a drill day also assumes that these type of things only happen at school, but there’ve been events at locations such as malls, event centers, and other areas where kids frequent. The knowledge they gain from these drills in school can be lifesaving and applicable in other situations. For example, in El Paso, Texas, there was a shooting at a Walmart, and several kids sought cover and encouraged adults to go with them.

And we all hope our kids never have to experience anything like this, but if they do, there’s a big difference in having skills and knowledge about what to do versus getting trapped in fight, flight, or freeze. In this case, the kids understood what was happening, and more importantly, they knew what to do. They knew to try to get to a locked room, stay out of sight, and be quiet, and they were able to take the fundamentals they learned at school and apply them to a totally different setting. They were using the skills and knowledge they learned from lockdown drills to handle a real-life situation outside of the school setting. Now, Shawna, I also know you have kids in school or school age right now you, or do you address drills with your kids?

Shawna White:

Yeah, I do. I have two kids. I have one in middle school and one in elementary school. I don’t usually just bring up the subject with them, but from time to time, opportunities present themselves. Sometimes, I pick one of my kids up from school, and they tell me that they did a particular drill that day, or sometimes, I get a notification from the school that they’ve conducted a particular drill that day. I use these times as sort of debriefing opportunities to ask my kids about what the drill involved, how they felt about the drill, and what they learned because I really want to make sure they’re understanding the response actions they should take.

I want to understand also how their schools are implementing drills, and I want to make sure too that my kids understand why they do drills at school and why drills are important. So I try to reinforce what they’re learning through their drills at school by having them talk back to me more about it. This also gives me an opportunity to clarify anything if I need to if they’re maybe misunderstanding anything. But not all parents are knowledgeable about this topic. So I think it’s really important that schools are educating parents on their safety drills as well so parents can have these kinds of conversations with their students.

Another thing I always do when I have these kinds of conversations with my kids is I use it as an opportunity to reassure them that they’re safe at school. I want them to feel safe at school. And I want them to know that if an emergency does happen, whether it’s inclement weather or an accident outside the school that impacts their school or whatever the case may be, that the school has plans to handle those types of situations. Knowing that the school has safety plans in place should make them feel safer and more secure at school. Just like at home, even though we’re generally safe at home, we have safety plans in place in case of emergencies to make sure that we stay safe.

We secure the doors to keep us safe inside. We know the safest spot to shelter inside the house if there’s a severe storm. We know where we would relocate to if it became unsafe to stay at home due to flooding or something like that. So I explained to them that the schools… the school does drills because they have these safety plans in place, and they need to practice their safety plans occasionally to make sure that they work and make sure the school is able to keep everyone safe if there’s an emergency.

So I appreciate hearing from them and talking to them about the drills they do in school, and I also really appreciate the Walmart example you just gave. Those are the kinds of skills I hope my kids learn from practicing drills in school. These are real-life skills that they’re learning in school, and they’re transferable outside of the school environment.

Jeff Caldwell:

I think those are really some great suggestions from a parent perspective, and sometimes, just planning for how to have these conversations and conduct the drills can actually be overwhelming for schools.

Shawna White:

Yeah. Which is, again, why I think it’s really important that schools are providing some type of educational materials to send home to parents or even more formal types of training settings with parents. But I also want to emphasize that there are additional things that schools can do before, during, and after conducting drills to help further minimize any potential negative outcomes.

The National Association of School Psychologists has a number of guidance documents to help schools plan for this, and we also have some links to some of those at the end of this presentation slide deck. Just as an example, though, schools can train staff to recognize trauma reactions before they do drills so that staff are equipped to recognize those reactions during drills and be able to handle that appropriately. And schools can also make sure that appropriate staff and appropriate resources are available following drills to care for anyone who may be unintentionally affected by the drill.

Jeff Caldwell:

Absolutely.

Shawna White:

Honestly, though, Jeff, I would never want my children or even the staff at their schools to be exposed to the types of immersive lockdown exercises we discussed earlier. For students and school staff, I think that drills meet their needs without going that far.

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah. I personally can’t imagine a situation where a truly more advanced immersion-type scenario or exercise would be appropriate for students in particular in a school setting. It’s really hard enough to create the time and space in school to teach the simple drill concepts, much less build in everything that would be needed to take on a live-action scenario.

I want to reiterate that drills should be used to create muscle memory and test what we’ve discussed and what we’ve learned. There’s really no benefit to conducting immersion exercises intended to mimic real-world scenarios, such as with actors portraying active shooters trying to gain access into buildings and shooting at people with simulation guns if there has been no training on what to do. This really just adds stress and trauma.

Again, the drill is specifically testing what we know and how we apply that knowledge. It’s not intended to just drop us into something that is totally unfamiliar and completely overwhelming. I think it’s important to remember that the bottom line is we’re working to keep our kids safe. It’s really no different than requiring them to buckle up when they get in a car. We can’t totally prevent a car accident, but we can’t take steps to mitigate the harmful outcomes.

Shawna White:

Yes. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to achieve by practicing drills in our schools. So I know we’ve covered a lot of material just now. I do hope that some of the strategies we’ve talked about are helpful to some, if not all, of our audience members.

Just as a reminder, these links are extremely useful resources, and there are a lot of other resources embedded within those that are listed here. And this slide deck and the links here will be shared following today’s presentation for anyone who’s interested. Okay. With that, let’s go ahead and open it up for Q&A.

Antoinette Miller:

All right. Thank you, Shawna and Jeff. For all of our attendees, if you have any other questions for our presenters, please make sure you access the Q&A function and add those questions there. So as a parent and an educator, this has all been really informative and helpful for me. I especially appreciate your emphasis of drills without traumatizing, training being meaningful and relevant, and then also empowering our kids with knowledge and confidence.

With that being said, we have quite a few questions for you both, Shawna and Jeff. So the first one, “What are your recommendations for schools and districts when considering to partner with outside agencies or specific programs that conduct safety drills? For example, those that teach active shooter drills like ALICE or Run-Hide-Fight.”

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, so I think those are really decisions that school districts have to take very seriously. So there’s nothing wrong with what’s being taught in the ALICE or the Run-Hide-Fight scenarios, but again, it depends on what the developmental stages of the staff and the students that that’s being brought into. So those are even some scenarios, not those training, specifically where some of these kind of active or overactive scenarios have been played out.

And I think it’s just important to understand it has to be developmentally appropriate for the age group that’s being talked to and developmentally appropriate for where those particular students are, what traumas they’ve been through, what’s going on. Those are certainly helpful types of trainings, and they take a step further into the drills and give a much more advanced piece to it. But there’s a lot of training that takes place with those before they get incorporated into anything, and that training aspect is really important.

Shawna White:

And I think, Jeff, you would agree here that it’s extremely important that schools and districts are partnering with these outside agencies and that they do have those established partnerships and potentially even MOUs or some sort of agreements in place with outside agencies to respond during actual emergencies, but that they don’t necessarily… they may want to come out to the district to conduct their own exercises to make sure that everyone’s in alignment with how they would respond and that the plans that they have in place don’t have any gaps or that they aren’t making some assumptions that need to be addressed, but that they don’t necessarily want to be doing that while school is in session with staff or with students.

Jeff Caldwell:

Right.

Shawna White:

Those are really activities for the responders.

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah. When you start talking about those as outside entities, it’s really important to involve them, but it is important to understand the training needs. I come from a law enforcement background. The training needs for a law enforcement officer is different than the training needs for a staff member or a teacher in a school, and that’s different than the training needs for a student in particular.

Antoinette Miller:

Thank you. During your presentation, and you spoke about parents and just them being aware, knowing what’s going on, one of the questions in the chat is, “As a parent, how can I ensure that what’s happening at my kid’s school are drills and not the immersive type of exercises you discussed? And with that, are there liability issues if schools conduct immersive exercises?”

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, so I guess I’ll kick that off a little bit. So the liability issues, I’m probably not going to speak to a whole lot that’s really more a legal representation type of a deal, but there can be, and there have been lawsuits that have come out of those types of drills. So it’s important for schools to understand that and know that as well. The ways that I think school… parents can get involved is be involved in the parent associations that are in your school.

If you have the ability to get involved, a lot of schools will have planning teams that are planning drills, exercises, even planning around the emergency operations, and parents can be involved in some of those. There are even states that have enacted legislation that makes it really difficult, if not prohibits, these types of immersive type exercises. Texas is one that’s passed legislation that makes it extremely difficult to do. They don’t prohibit it, but in order to do it, you’ve got a lot of hoops to jump through, which I think highlights the severity of the trauma and the issues that can compound in those types of scenarios.

Shawna White:

Yeah, I agree 100%. Fully encourage parents to be involved and to ask questions even if you’re not actively involved in a committee or something like that, but just being vocal and asking the questions and making your voice heard. I personally have joined. It was not related to drills but actually related to recess at my kids’ school, but I’ve joined committees to make sure that my voice as a parent was heard and to try and make a difference to try and improve the environment that my kids are in on a daily basis.

So yeah, I agree with that. And we’ve actually worked with a state recently on specifically developing some training, more of a presentation, I guess, for parents that kind of explains to them, here’s what the legislation requires around drills in our state, and here’s information about how we actually implement that across the state and our school districts.

Jeff Caldwell:

And I would just add too that in the resources that we provided, there’s some really great information in there about doing drills from a trauma-informed perspective. So even just asking questions of the school like, “Hey, are we including this? Are we aware of this? Do we know about these things?”

Antoinette Miller:

Yes, thank you. Yeah, I mean, as a parent, it’s definitely important for me to stay in the know. And so I can know what’s going on with my daughter’s school.

Shawna White:

And get your evidence, right. You’ve got links to these resources, right. Do your homework, show them the research, take the information with you. Instead of just it being your feeling or opinion, back it up. The information is out there, so make use of it.

Antoinette Miller:

Right. So kind of switching gears to the school and the staff lens, what guidance would you give schools and staff for supporting students with functional or access needs? So students with different abilities during the safety drills.

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah. So that should be incorporated into an emergency plan. And then from the emergency plan really should be… I mean, we’re doing some drills just because they’re legislatively mandated, but also we should be doing those actions to try to test our emergency operation plan. And I think it’s important when we’re doing drills to understand we do need to create the scenarios where we’re utilizing the things that we would utilize during an emergency if it’s some type of transport chair, anything like that.

So making sure staff knows what to do in those situations, understands what the needs are for the given drill or emergency that might be being drilled on, and understand where all these things are, how to use them, make sure they’re functional. So the guidance I would have is that there’s a bigger planning issue around children with those type of needs, and making sure that we’re practicing that in our drills is really vital.

Shawna White:

Yeah. The only thing that I have to add to that, and this isn’t even specific really to this scenario, but to anything really, is making sure that more than one staff member knows where the equipment is, knows what the process is, making sure that you have sort of a backup system in place or plan in place. If you have a substitute teacher there on a particular day, just making sure that you have backup staff and more than one or two people know how to handle those situations.

Antoinette Miller:

Yeah. That planning piece is so important, and I was just thinking back of my time in the classroom. And we usually had our safety drill once a year, and that’s entirely not enough. Yeah, definitely. So we have about two more questions. I’m going to see if I can get them in.

Jeff Caldwell:

Okay.

Antoinette Miller:

So one question. “How can we go about updating our comprehensive school safety plans, especially since it contains so much information? And then what are those best practices for communicating these plans with our educational partners?”

Jeff Caldwell:

Well, those are two good questions. The first one about updating. So there are states that have requirements on how plans have to be updated. A lot of them have annual requirements. I would suggest that it really requires more frequent use than that, but what you can do is segment the plan out. So depending on how the plan is designed in very traditional emergency operation plans, there’s a basic plan. And then there would be annexes that would address each one or functional that would address functions like evacuation or reunification or would address certain incidents like storm incidents, active threat incidents, and just taking those individually and updating them instead of trying to do the whole plan at one time I think is really beneficial.

So parsing that out, making sure that you’ve got the latest updates, making sure that you understand what the new things are, any changes that have happened in the school. Sometimes, plans will sit for a long time on a shelf, and we’ve done updates to a school where fire routes and other things aren’t even accurate anymore. And so it’s just making sure that we’re updating all that as we go and then incorporating that into an overall safety plan in the school. Looking at that from the climate survey perspective, looking at it from the auditing perspective, just incorporating all of those things in. And then the training piece of it, I think you suggested training. Was that… Did I get that-

Shawna White:

Communicating-

Jeff Caldwell:

Communicating.

Shawna White:

… [inaudible] it was.

Jeff Caldwell:

Yeah, well… So yeah. Okay, that’s where I was going with that, training is one of the best ways to communicate what’s going on. What are the expectations of everybody in the school related to the plan? If I’m a classroom teacher, I may not need to have all of the details that are in the plan if I’m like an incident commander or something, but I do need to know what my role in my part is and know that I’m capable of doing that. I have all the resources I need to be able to accomplish that in the event that there’s a drill or a disaster. So it’s really that communication piece is accomplished a lot through the training.

Shawna White:

Yeah. And I did just put a link in the chat for everyone to the Comprehensive School Safety Plan’s guidance from CDE, just to be able to have a reference there. There’s a checklist and some templates available on that site. But I do… I mean, it’s called a Comprehensive School Safety Plan. It is obviously a lot of information, and so just breaking that out piece by piece and doing your best to address each one, taking the lessons learned, and then moving forward as you go. But that link is in the chat for anyone who is interested.

Antoinette Miller:

Thank you. Okay. One last question. “What are… Can you provide us with a few final words of wisdom or final thoughts on this topic?”

Jeff Caldwell:

Man, so mine would be… a couple of things would be, first of all, just remember we train first then we test. We overwhelm people when we put them in situations where they have no clue what to do. It’s not fair to them, and it’s not actually helping us get any better at what we need to do in those situations.

If anything, it’s traumatizing people to be more fearful about it and even fearful about doing the drills. And then the other one would be, what we’ve talked a lot about in this presentation is find ways to incorporate these things into daily activities. The more we can just pull that in and make it a part of what we do every day, when it becomes familiar in that way, it becomes much easier to accomplish when we need to do it.

Shawna White:

Yeah. I think another really important thing to remember is we focus a lot on students, obviously, right, but we have adults in the building as well, and adults have trauma as well. Adults have history.

So in the planning process, when you’re planning for all of this and you’re bringing your staff back on before school starts, learning more about your staff and understanding where people are coming from and what types of situations may be more difficult for some versus others, making sure that who you’re assigning certain roles to, that they’re capable of handling that from a variety perspectives, right. But just making sure that we don’t forget that we also need to consider the mental health of our adults who are there to take care of our children as well.

Antoinette Miller:

Well, thank you both, Jeff and Shawna. I really appreciate it. We just want to thank you so much for attending today. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Shawna. I really appreciate being in this space with you and learning from you. And again, we want to just thank all of our participants for joining us today. Have a good afternoon.