Lockdowns: How schools are coping with the age of the gun

Principal Harold Krische knew Sept. 11, 2007, was not going to be an ordinary day when a parent came into the office of D.W. Poppy Secondary School in Langley, B.C., to report a shooting. The school day was about to begin and the incident was less than a kilometre away.

A vehicle with at least two armed men had been chasing a car with man in it who had been driving his son to school. The parent crashed into a ditch and his black Hummer was sprayed with bullets. Krische called the RCMP, and they suggested a full school lockdown. He agreed. "This is not a drill," he announced over the public address system.

"I think lockdowns definitely have a usefulness," he said later. "You are able to move into a heightened state of safety and security."

The newest procedure for trying to keep kids safe in what used to be the safest of environments — the local school — lockdowns are increasingly common at elementary and high schools across the country. Police or principals impose lockdowns when schools cannot be evacuated safely in the event of an emergency and when they deem it is safer for students to remain in rooms behind locked doors.

When a school is locked down, nobody enters or leaves the building without permission. Lockdown procedures vary from school board to school board, but they are evolving as schools gain experience with real lockdowns.

Many schools across the country now regularly have lockdown drills but they are still held less frequently than fire drills, when everybody leaves the building.

Lockdowns are not without their critics.

Culture of fear

Some parents say lockdown drills have the potential to scare the heck out of students, particularly younger ones, and real lockdowns create a culture of fear in schools. They also suggest that in the event of a school shooting, chaos would erupt, panic would take over and the procedures might not be followed.

Following the dramatic school shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007 a campus law enforcement expert told an investigating panel that lockdowns at schools might not always be realistic and are difficult to execute at large schools during emergencies. At Dawson College on Sept. 13, 2006, when Kimveer Gill opened fire, killing one student and injuring 20 others, students ran out of the building. There was no time for a school-wide lockdown, although some classrooms did one on their own.

"The violence that walked in through the door that day really came out of nowhere," says Donna Varrica, a spokesperson for Dawson. "Historically this has been an incredibly safe school."

Still, Dawson has since put in place a formal emergency measures manual and has fitted its classes with locks and deadbolts.

Police and school board administrators, however, say that while lockdown drills and real lockdowns might be controversial, they are here to stay because the drills prepare students for the real thing and lockdowns imposed in the face of a threat have the potential to save lives.

Lockdowns are intended to isolate a threat to a school, whether that threat is an armed intruder, wild animals in the yard, a chemical spill nearby, a violent incident in the neighbourhood or, according to the policy of one board, an act of terrorism. Lockdown drills are mandatory in some boards, highly recommended in others. As Krische says, lockdowns reflect the culture of the community.

How they work

In a full lockdown, the principal tells students and staff to go to the nearest classroom. Hallways are cleared, doors are closed and locked and students and staff who are outside may be told to return to the gym.

Administrators then talk to police and security. In the classroom, teachers take attendance and tell students to remain calm, keep quiet and stay away from doors and windows. Students may be asked to sit on the floor. Blinds or drapes may be drawn and lights turned off. If doors have windows, they may be covered.

Everyone is expected to make as little noise as possible while the authorities deal with the emergency at hand. In the primary grades, some teachers say they read stories to children seated on the floor to keep them calm. Procedures depend on the threat to a school and its layout.

Sgt. Jeff Harder, who is in charge of 17 school resource officers in Calgary, says drills teach staff and students what to do and how to behave when a real lockdown occurs. Harder says he recommends that the Calgary Board of Education insist that its 219 schools have two such drills a year, one to prepare for a threat outside the school and another to prepare for a threat inside the school. Lockdown drills in at the Calgary board are not mandatory, but the board says the majority of its schools follow the police recommendation.

"We are not trying to scare the kids. We try to keep lockdown drills positive," Harder says. "If not practised, there can be a lot of errors."

Minaz Jivraj, school safety and security officer for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board in Ontario, which covers 144 schools in Mississauga, Brampton, Caledon and Orangeville, says the idea behind real lockdowns is that they can reduce the number of casualties that could occur if there is a shooter inside or outside a school.

He says police have found that school shootings happen quickly, they are "absolutely chaotic," and once a shooter takes action, it appears from previous school shootings that the shooter may not be thinking logically even if he has an intended target.

"The intended targets are not always the actual victims," he says. "Targets wandering around the hallways are easier targets than those that are in a locked room because the shooter would have to look for them. They are not in his obvious visual range."

A 'manageable level of anxiety'

Jivraj says parents have placed trust in school boards to protect their children from harm.

"We can't have a panicked environment. We have to provide for the safety of the children in our trust," he says. "If we did nothing and something happened, the parents would ask: what did you do to prevent injury from occurring to my child?"

Defending the practice, Stu Auty, president of the Canadian Safe Schools Network in Toronto, also observes that lockdowns help to prevent lawsuits from parents. If an armed intruder entered a school and students were shot, and the school did nothing, parents would not simply ask questions and demand answers, they would take legal action.

"There's a liability factor," he says.

Auty acknowledges that lockdown drills and real lockdowns create anxiety in students but he says it's a "manageable level of anxiety." And he says lockdown drills will continue regardless of the fear they might generate because they are a response to a changing world.

"It has now become a reality that kids have weapons and kids are prepared to use them. There has to be a societal response to that reality. It's changing world in which we live," he says.

Indeed, schools in Canada have been locked down for all kinds of threats, including bomb scares, ominous graffiti, death threats, and suicidal students. A Catholic elementary school in Toronto was locked down on Sept. 14, 2007, because four pit bulls were on the loose near the yard.

The day before, St. Edmund Campion Secondary School in Brampton was locked down for more than two hours after a report of a student carrying a gun on school property. The gun was later found out to be a pellet gun. Police made an arrest off school grounds.

Bill McLeod, safe schools co-ordinating principal for the Toronto District School Board, says the majority of lockdowns in Toronto occur when there is a threat in the nearby community. The TDSB takes lockdowns very seriously.

Its 550 schools practice two lockdown drills a year, compared with six fire drills a year.

The board defines lockdowns as full external, full internal and partial. A full external is used when there is danger outside the school, a full internal is used when there is danger inside the school, and a partial is used when there is potential danger near the school. In a partial lockdown, classes continue but doors are locked. Each school in the board has to develop a plan to prepare for emergency and the board defines five different levels of threat.

The TDSB, the largest school board in the country, had 104 lockdowns in the 2005-2006 school year, the last year for which statistics are available. There were 83 in elementary schools, 21 in secondary schools.

McLeod says if a violent incident or a serious threat occurs in the neighbourhood, police determine which schools go into lockdown. He says it's as though they draw a circle around the incident and order a lockdown of all schools within that circle, sealing off the facilities while officials deal with the situation.

"If an incident happened at Bathurst and Eglinton, there might be 15 schools that go into partial lockdown," he says.

The board would communicate with parents using local media.

'Lie on the floor'

In its procedures, under staff responsibilities, the board provides a suggested list of what to do in the event of a lockdown, a list that is to be modified depending on the circumstances. One line reads: "Everyone should lie on the floor if gunshots are heard."

Lockdown drills are gradually being seen as equally important as fire drills. Gary Little, associate superintendent of schools for the Vancouver School Board, says they are just as relevant. The VSB's 109 schools generally carry out two lockdown drills a year, but they are not mandatory, despite the urgings of the Vancouver Police Department.

"In the past 100 years, there have been far more tragedies as a result of violence than there have been fatalities or injuries through fire in schools," Little says. "We are mandated by civic bylaws to have fire drills. We are going to be looking at the possibility this year of enshrining lockdown drills in policy. I think it's time to move this to the policy level."

The Nova Scotia government is contemplating a provincial template that would include lockdown procedures.

Const. Mark Young, a police officer who acts as an adviser on school safety and police services for the Halifax Regional School Board and Nova Scotia education department, submitted a report on school emergency planning to the department in March 2007.

It recommends that all schools in the province have a consistent approach to emergency planning, that schools have training in student threat assessment procedures, by which they can determine if a student is a potential threat, and that they undertake crime prevention audits, which means looking how to prevent crime by improving the physical design of a building.

The Halifax Regional School Board, with 138 schools, encourages schools to hold lockdown drills at least twice a year. Young says he recommends that the practice be put into policy and made mandatory.

Adjusting for young kids

Sue Huff, a mother of two children in Edmonton, lobbied the Edmonton public school board in the fall of 2005 to modify its lockdown drills to make less them frightening for younger students. Her hard work with a local trustee paid off. The drills at Westglen Elementary, the school where her children attended, were altered to include fewer fearful elements.

"Now, if a child is left in the washroom during a lockdown drill, somebody goes and gets that child. Nobody shakes the doorknobs to make sure they are locked," she says.

"I said, let's look at these things from the point of view of a five-year-old. I compared it to the duck and cover drills of the sixties. Nobody seemed to be looking at the psychological effects on children."

Huff, now a candidate for trustee in the Edmonton public school board, says she threatened to pull her son out of class on the day that the first lockdown drill was held at the school. She says she managed to convince the administration to hold off on carrying out such drills for a year while the procedures were modified.

"I still have questions about why we are doing this. I still think it's done in the interests of police and lawyers. It's not in the interests of kids. I want children to feel that school is a safe place not likely to be invaded by armed men."

For Krische, a real lockdown in the second full week of classes was a challenge. There had been no time to hold a drill that school year. It was a lesson for him, his staff and the more than 900 students at the school.

At least 12 students sent text messages to their parents during the emergency to tell them that a lockdown was in full swing even though cellphone use is restricted at the school. The office had to field several calls from anxious parents.

"It taught us a few things," Krische says. "You know, our school is in a rural area. It's almost sleepy hollow. This is one of the last places where you would expect this to happen."