Justin Parmenter

Opinion contributor

I sat silently in a school staff meeting recently while our faculty debriefed after last month’s active shooter training. All kinds of thoughts and emotions ran through me as I listened to colleagues brainstorming possible ways to prepare for an armed intruder roaming our building.

Should we stash a hammer in our desk drawer for use as an improvised weapon? Keep a supply of feminine hygiene products on hand to stop the bleeding if someone is shot? Have students ready to throw books at the attacker? But the absurdity of the entire conversation really hit home for me when a well-meaning staff member suggested teachers be given bags of marbles to throw down in the hallway in the event of an armed prowler.

Have we completely lost our marbles?

Schools learn to bunker up, fight back

There are nearly 133,000 K-12 schools in the United States. Last year, 24 of them experienced shootings that resulted in injury or death, according to Education Week data.

Despite the relative rarity of such events, the number of schools doing lockdown drills is on the rise. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of schools that had a plan in place for procedures to be performed in the event of a shooting increased from 79% in the 2003-04 school year to 92% in the 2015-16 school year. And about 95% of public schools now have students and teachers practice huddling in silence, hiding from an imaginary gunman.

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Schools are preparing more aggressively for active shooter scenarios — in some cases even using fake bombs, weapons loaded with blanks, and students made up with realistic bloody bullet wounds. At an Indiana elementary school this year, teachers were told to kneel against a classroom wall while local law enforcement unexpectedly shot them with pellet guns in a simulated execution. Teachers say they were told, “This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing.”

It’s important to note that the annual occurrence of school-associated violent deaths over the past quarter century has remained relatively consistent, or even slightly declined. But over that same period, our actions in response to those deaths have changed completely, with society placing increased responsibility for stopping school shootings on the schools themselves.

As schools have accepted this responsibility, we’ve opened our doors to police and military types telling us exactly how to prepare for an attack. By doing so, we’ve ensured the conversation will remain largely centered around reactive approaches such as how best to bunker up and fight back instead of focusing on the underlying causes of the problem.

Danger of drills to the 'lockdown generation'

We must also consider the psychological impact on students and staff alike of constantly calling attention to the potential for violence in our schools. Heartbreaking stories of young children in the lockdown generation who, convinced they are about to die, compose goodbye letters to their parents or even write wills to designate who can have their toys when they are gone.

Experts in childhood trauma say there is the potential for children who are regularly exposed to frightening circumstances to suffer from symptoms that include depression, anxiety, poor sleep and worsening academic progression. This is not the nurturing school environment our students deserve.

On the teacher side, educators who already wear innumerable hats are now expected to endure the pressure of preparing to act as law enforcement and neutralize an armed maniac intent on murdering their students. How can that added stress not have a detrimental impact on their teaching and on their mental well-being in general?

If our lockdown and active shooter training culture were actually making us safer, then it might all be worthwhile. But it’s not.

A recently published review of school-based practices from 2000 to 2018 found that “none of the currently employed school firearm violence prevention methods have empirical evidence to show they actually diminish firearm violence in schools.” The study’s authors determined that our ineffective approaches create a false sense of security. They suggested that school officials refrain from giving in to “political pressures to ‘do something’ when that ‘something’ is likely to be ineffective and wasteful of limited school resources.”

I understand the value of being prepared for disaster, and our schools have long-standing safety protocols in place for that reason. However, we must be sure that the measures we're taking are actually serving their intended purpose and are not doing more harm than good.

We must stop expecting our educators to play the role of law enforcement and let them focus on teaching our children.

And we must redirect every bit of energy we are putting into ineffective, potentially traumatizing nonsolutions toward addressing the root causes and conditions that are contributing to the unique epidemic of gun violence in the United States.

Justin Parmenter is a seventh grade English teacher and education advocate in Charlotte, North Carolina. He writes regularly at notesfromthechalkboard.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JustinParmenter