The Wrong Solution?
I've raised questions - admittedly half-formed ones - over schools' process of "locking down" whenever there's any kind of emergency.
In the case of school shootings, I think it's generally a deeply stupid idea, keeping students locked into their rooms like cattle in pens, waiting for a gunman to get around to them (as the shooter at Red Lake did).
In other cases - well, I have to wonder.
Yesterday, there was an explosion at a South St. Paul chemical plant, which sent a cloud of toxic smoke into the air and around the neighborhood - a neighborhood that includes a number of schools. Who promptly "locked down":
About 2:45 p.m., South Washington County Schools began calling back some students who were walking home and kept others inside who had not left school, said spokeswoman Barb Brown. Parents were allowed to pick up their children. The smoke was visible from the southern end of the district.
Cottage Grove police asked the district to hold students awhile to be safe, although a specific threat from the fire had not been identified, Brown said.
Are school airtight?
I don't know what is the right thing to do with a school full of students in a situation like that. But if kids are, by law, supposed to be crammed into schools for six-odd hours a day, they had better know.
After 9/11, I asked a number of school district functionaries about situations like this; what if there was a chemical (or chemical weapon) cloud drifting toward the school? What if there were a shooting? What if there were a Beslan-like incident, where the SWAT team wasn't able to rescue the students, penned into their rooms?
I'm still looking for answers. I just don't think "locking down" the school is the answer nearly as much as our school officials think it is...
Posted by Mitch at
October 12, 2006 06:48 AM
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Dave Koppel wrote about this recently (hat tip Instapundit)
Kids that stay "locked down" in neat rows get lined up and shot, see Columbine, the Amish girls, that Russian school.
Kids that run like crazy present moving targets and fewer of them.
Locking down the school is an instinctive control response, but it also may be an example of trying to turn the Titanic.
What if "common sense" doesn't "stand to reason"?
What if the right response to armed invaders in class is Sir Robin the Chickenhearted's instinctive response: run away, run away?
Do we as a society have the courage to admit that sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing?
Or is it better to keep little kids lined up in nice rows to make things tidy for the killer?
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Posted by: nate bissonette at October 12, 2006 08:20 AMIf the classrooms have a secure door to prevent entry by a armed intruder then a lockdown is an appropriate response. Kids would not sit in the desks but back in the corner away from the door and not visible from the class windows. Sending them into the hallway to be sprayed with bullets is not a good idea. The goal is to isolate the shooter to the hallways as much as possible to limit the targets and give law enforcement a better chance to find the shooter. Imaging 2000 kids running for thier lives and having two cops having to sort through them all and stop the one kid in the middle.
BTW the red lake lockdown did keep the shooter out of several classrooms.
The challange is to ensure that classrooms have a secure door. A standard commercial steel door and frame with $100 deadbolt locks take great effort with heavy tools and many minutes to get passed. A wood door with a large glass window or side window as every schoool I have been in has is not secure, ever. The other issue is most shooters are in one or more unlocked classrooms before the alarm is raised or shoot up hallways and other unsecured areas.
BTW a recent Mythbusters looked at shooting locks with a variety of weapons. A high quality lock will still keep the door secure.
A lockdown can also ensure orderly evacuation in cases like the chemical fire, you don't want to exit directly into the toxic cloud but away from it. Ideally there would be plans and practice for this as is done with fire evacuation.
Dave
Posted by: Dave at October 12, 2006 12:18 PM