Assessing the Relationship Between Exposure to Violence and Perceptions of School Safety and Emergency Preparedness in the Context of Lockdown Drills

ABSTRACT

Although lockdown drills are a practice widely used in K-12 public schools across the United States to prepare students and staff to respond to acts of violence, research has only just begun to consider the impacts of these practices on those who participate in them. This study adds to the growing body of literature by examining the potential impact of students’ exposure to violence (ETV) in their school on perceptions of safety and emergency preparedness in the context of lockdown drills. The findings indicate that ETV decreases both safety and preparedness perceptions. The association between perceived school safety and ETV, however, weakens over time and may be lessened by participation in drills and associated training. Implications for policy and practice are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Lockdown drills
• exposure to violence
• school safety
• emergency preparedness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The State of New York requires that schools conduct four lockdown and eight evacuation (fire) drills each academic year. See New York State Education Law, Title 1, Article 17 § 807.

2. This project was approved by the IRB at SUNY Oswego under proposal # 20180801db1. This same IRB approval and subsequent data set also were used in studies by Schildkraut and Nickerson (2020, 2020a) and Schildkraut et al. (2020), though these examined different research questions and used additional measures not included in the present study.

3. Students could not be opted out of the lockdown drills as these are required by state law.

4. The first drill was initiated using the call “This is a lockdown. This is a drill.” The call for the second drill was amended to reflect the language of SRP-X: “Lockdown! Locks, lights, out of sight! This is a drill.” In both instances, these calls were repeated.

5. Available at https://data.nysed.gov/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Syracuse City School District.

Notes on contributors

Jaclyn Schildkraut

Jaclyn Schildkraut is the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Her research focuses on mass and school shootings, school safety and security, and violence prevention, response, and recovery.

Amanda B. Nickerson

Amanda B. Nickerson, Ph.D., NCSP is a Professor of School Psychology and director of the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Her research focuses on school crisis prevention and intervention, violence and bullying prevention, and building social-emotional strengths of youth.

Matt Vogel

Matt Vogel is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, SUNY and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology and the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis. His research focuses on the causes, consequences, and prevention of community violence.

Abbie Finnerty

Abbie Finnerty is a second-year law student at Syracuse Law School and a graduate of the criminal justice program at the State University of New York at Oswego. Her research interests include law and crime trends.