LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Schools are back. Classes are in full swing. And in the U.S., that means the possibility of a school shooting is just a reality for students. On yesterday's program, we took you to a school in Minnesota to hear how it prepares its students for mass violence if that day were ever to come.
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: Here, listen up, everybody.
UNIDENTIFIED STAFF MEMBER: Can I have your attention, please? This is a lockdown drill. Teachers, please secure your students in your classrooms. This is a lockdown drill. Thank you.
FADEL: And middle schoolers there told us that these drills are just normal to them. But should they be normal? I spoke to Jillian Peterson about this. She's a psychologist who studies mass shootings, and she is the executive director of the Violence Prevention Project, a research center based in St. Paul, Minnesota. I started by asking her if lockdown drills are effective.
JILLIAN PETERSON: Students will often say that they do feel more prepared. They will also say that they feel more anxious, more worried and more fearful that a school shooting is going to happen at their school. And so those are the two things that we very much have to weigh against each other.
FADEL: How do you do that? I mean, how do educators weigh the effectiveness versus the harm?
PETERSON: I think that is the question a lot of school districts are facing because we don't truly know. You know, there have been cases where we can maybe point to them and say, I think because these kids had drilled, they were able to get behind doors faster and lock them, and maybe deaths were prevented. There are other cases we can point to and say, because these kids drilled in a certain way and that's not how the shooting happened, maybe more kids died than would have needed to, 'cause there's really no way to truly prepare for every instance. And so how do you weigh that - the may or may not work - against the fact that these kids are getting really upset and traumatized by this? And then the other key point is that the most likely perpetrator is a kid who goes to school in that building, who is running through the drills with everybody else.
FADEL: So then they would know what the school would do if there was a shooter.
PETERSON: Exactly.
FADEL: Now, as a psychologist, you've studied the effect of these drills - right? - as far as you can.
PETERSON: Yes.
FADEL: And what did you come away with? What was your big takeaway?
PETERSON: I came away with concern generally that, A, the most likely perpetrator is in the building; B, we're not totally sure that they work; C, like, we don't really, truly understand what we're doing to the young kids. We're just normalizing this type of violence. You know, I really got into this space when my oldest entered kindergarten, and he was coming home talking about just nonchalantly having to practice in case bullets came through the windows, right?
FADEL: Oh, my gosh.
PETERSON: At the age of 5. And we do have more evidence that certain kids are more impacted by this, especially if you are already kind of anxious, developmental issues, if you live in a community where you've experienced gun violence previously. So in Minnesota, we recently passed some legislation that said you have to do these in a trauma-informed way. You have to make sure kids know their drills. You have to let parents know ahead of time. You have to let parents opt out if they don't want to participate. And you have to debrief with kids afterwards 'cause even high schoolers will say, you can't expect me to rehearse for my death and then go back to learning a math assignment. I just...
FADEL: Oh, my gosh.
PETERSON: ...I can't do that.
FADEL: What are the alternatives? I mean, how do you protect kids in school without traumatizing them for something that may never happen?
PETERSON: If you're going to drill, do it in a trauma-informed way. Two is you can just train the adults and then train kids to listen to adults in emergencies. And, I mean, third is just really thinking about prevention and what we know about who does this, which is the most likely person to do this is a kid in the building who we see every day, who's giving out warning signs, who's telling people they're thinking about it. So building things like anonymous reporting systems, threat assessment teams, those pieces - that prevention side is just as critical as training for the reaction side.
We should teach kids crisis intervention skills. We should teach them how to, when they're worried about a friend, report to a teacher. And even things like how to be inclusive, right? Like, how to make sure nobody's eating alone. We know that these kids tend to be really isolated. There's so many things we could be teaching kids to do to prevent violence beyond just hiding in closets.
FADEL: Dr. Jillian Peterson is a forensic psychologist and the executive director of the Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. Thank you so much for your time.
PETERSON: Absolutely. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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