Florida School Fakes Shooting as a Drill – Why This Is a Terrible Idea

It’s 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning. You’re at work when you suddenly get a text message from your child. Your child’s message is only one line, but it sends a chill down your spine: “I thought he was going to shoot me.”

You immediately leave your office. You get to the car and race down to the school. You run a couple of red lights along the way. There are dozens of other parents in the parking lot. Police have their weapons drawn. Nobody knows what is going on. Your heart is pounding. Despite police warnings, you go inside the school and find your child hudled in a corner with a few other classmates. As you take your child out of the school, an announcement comes over the school announcement system. The “shooting” was only a drill.

This “active shooter” drill took place at Jewett Middle Academy in Winter Haven, Florida. On November 13, the school principal announced the school was going into lockdown. Police burst into classrooms with guns drawn, including an AR-15 rifle. The weapons were unloaded, but nobody informed the children. Actually, the school principal and the Winter Haven Police Department neglected to inform parents or even teachers. Parents only found out about the drill through an email after the drill was over.

Winter Haven police have attempted to defend their drill. Officers claim their weapons were unloaded and pointed at the ground. The drill was supposed to simulate the surprise that children, teachers, and parents felt had there been a real shooting. However, the Winter Haven police did acknowledge that feedback was mixed and promised that officers would not use weapons in future drills.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, many states, including Florida, New Jersey, Colorado Tennessee and Missouri have enacted “active shooter drills.” Some of these drills have included volunteers to play hostages and victims. Other drills were more like Winter Haven, where children, parents and teachers were scared senseless. In many drills, an officer acts a gunman and takes “hostages.” Some schools go so far as to use fake blood.

One Terrible Idea

The Winter Haven “drill” is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard. What if a parent or a teacher heard that there was a shooter and decided that now was the time to use their gun? The hypothetical fire fight that police and school principals were practicing for might become real. Given that many people believe arming teachers is the solution, that’s a very real possibility. The opposite result could also occur. Fire drills have become so common that people often take them for granted. It would be extremely ironic if schools had so many drills that when a real shooter shows up some people might not realize it before the shooter starts killing people.

Winter Haven police claim that they didn’t inform the community about their drill because they wanted to create the surprise that comes from a shooting. We have plenty of fire or earthquake drills and nobody proposes that we should heat or shake buildings to replicate the terror of a fire or earthquake. Indeed, some elderly individuals or young children might have heart conditions that could be triggered if the “drills” go so far as to terrify them.

In California, we conduct earthquake drills because earthquakes are a likely possibility that could occur and we have little in the way of a warning system. In the mid-west, we practice tornado drills because tornados will arise and we can’t stop tornados. We prepare for natural disasters with drills because there’s little else we can do about those disasters.

School shootings are very different. School shootings appear to be becoming more common, but they are far from natural. We cannot do anything to prevent earthquakes, but we can do far more to address school shootings. Arming teachers is a possibility. Treating more mentally ill people is another option. Creating or expanding insurance for depression and mental health is a good alternative. My point is that school shootings don’t have to be common and they don’t have to be unpreventable forces of nature. School shootings are the results of sick individuals in what some call a sick society. It’s a bad idea to equalize human actions with acts of god.

These drills concede that we cannot stop shootings. These drills treat shooters like faceless natural disasters, such as earthquakes, fires, or tornados. The problem is that the shooters are human. Potential shooters can be treated so that they don’t become the unstoppable beasts of destruction that the drills will treat them as. If we mischaracterize the nature of these shootings, we will only bring more harm upon our children.