Teachers have mixed feelings about how effective active shooter drills are when it comes to school safety, and most say the drills had no impact on their perceptions of safety at school, according to a new RAND survey.
The survey released on Wednesday found that teachers are split on whether participation in drills make them feel more prepared to respond to active shooter incidents. At the same time, 54% said the drills make students feel more prepared to respond to active shooter situations.
A majority of teachers questioned, 69%, said participating in active shooter drills had no impact on their perceptions of safety at school. One fifth of those surveyed said the drills make them feel more safe.
David Stein, president of the Montgomery County Education Association, told WTOP in an interview, “I’m not sure that they make people feel any safer, and I think the RAND study showed the same thing.”
“(The drills) can be good for logistics — for the school to figure out logistics — but in terms of making people feel safer, I don’t think they’re very successful,” Stein said.
Stein, who taught high school, said he believed the drills “can cause a lot of trauma, I think particularly with smaller students, with our younger kids.”
Instead, he said, it’s obviously important to be able to deal with a shooter in the school, “but it’s not really getting at the core needs, which is how can we help the mental health needs of our students in the schools.”
Maryland’s General Assembly passed a bill earlier this year that requires the Maryland Center for School Safety to collaborate with either a university “or a designated federal or national research entity” to produce a study on the effectiveness and impact of active shooter safety drills by July 1 of next year.
The MCSS is also required to publish best practices for active shooter safety drills for local school systems on or before Oct. 1 of this year.
The survey findings are based on a 2023 American Teacher Panel and used a randomly selected sample of 1,020 K-12 teachers.
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