Active Shooter and Lockdown Drills: The Effect on Educators

The lights are off. Twenty-eight people are sitting against the wall out of sight of the window, and you have counted them twice because the first count did not feel like enough. Somebody is crying quietly. Somebody else is finding it funny, which is its own kind of problem. You are listening to the hallway. Then the all-clear comes, and you have about four minutes before you are supposed to be teaching the causes of the First World War.

Nobody asks how that was. Not because anyone is callous, but because the question that gets asked after a drill is whether the children were all right, and that is the right question. It just leaves one adult per classroom entirely out of the accounting.

This page is about what these drills ask of the adults who run them. It is educational information rather than medical advice, and only a licensed professional who knows your situation can tell you what is happening for you. It is also not a page about security policy: we are not going to tell you which drill format keeps a building safest, because that is not our expertise and the research on whether drills change outcomes during a real incident sits outside everything cited below.

It is a different page from its neighbors, too. Our guide to teacher anxiety covers the ongoing kind that builds over a semester, and compassion fatigue in educators covers the slow cost of being close to other people’s distress. This one is about a specific, scheduled, repeated event that almost every educator in the country takes part in, and that almost nobody debriefs.

Nearly Every School Does This, and Most Teachers Do It More Than Once a Year

Start with how routine this is. In the 2021–22 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 96 percent of public schools had drilled students on a lockdown procedure, and 96 percent had a written plan for an active shooter scenario.

On the staff side, RAND surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,020 K-12 teachers through its American Teacher Panel in fall 2023. Of those teachers, 90 percent had taken part in active shooter drills during the previous school year; 28 percent had done one drill and 62 percent more than one. So for most educators this is not a rare event. It is a recurring feature of the calendar, like a fire drill, except that the thing being rehearsed is the worst day of your professional life.

The same survey found that about one in six teachers (16 percent) work in a district that has been touched by gun violence at some point since the 2019–20 school year — and the vast majority of those incidents fell short of the threshold for a mass shooting. For those educators, a drill is not an abstraction.

What the Research Actually Shows About the Adults

Here is the part the public argument usually skips: the evidence on how drills affect school staff is thin, and what exists does not point in one direction. We would rather say that plainly than pick the study that makes the better headline.

Most teachers describe drills as neither reassuring nor distressing. In the RAND survey, 69 percent said participating in active shooter drills had no effect on their sense of safety at school; 20 percent said drills made them feel safer and 12 percent said less safe. On preparedness — which is the entire stated purpose — teachers split almost evenly: 47 percent said drills made them feel more prepared, 50 percent said drills made no difference, and 2 percent said less prepared. That is a striking result for a practice conducted in nearly every school in the country.

One large study of school employees found drills associated with less fear. Schildkraut, Greene-Colozzi and Nickerson analyzed 3,000 surveys of school faculty, staff and administrators across three time periods, published in Psychology in the Schools in 2026. They found that employees who had taken part in repeated drills and emergency training reported lower fear of harm — for themselves and for their students — and were less likely to see a school shooting as possible, but only once the analysis accounted for each employee’s own exposure to violence. Greater exposure to violence went with more fear and higher perceived risk; believing your school was safe reduced those effects. Fear also varied by sex, race and ethnicity, and professional role.

One large study of school communities found the opposite signal. A 2021 paper in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications applied machine learning to 54 million social media posts from communities connected to 114 schools across 33 states, comparing the 90 days before a drill with the 90 days after. Markers of anxiety, stress and depression rose 39 to 42 percent after drills, alongside a rise in civic engagement of 10 to 106 percent. Two caveats matter and the authors state both: the sample was the whole school community — parents, staff, caregivers, bystanders — rather than teachers specifically, and the authors explicitly caution against drawing clinical inferences from it.

The national review said the evidence is not yet good enough. In August 2025 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a congressionally mandated report, School Active Shooter Drills: Mitigating Risks to Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Health. Its committee concluded that the effects of drills on mental, emotional and behavioral health have not been well researched, and that there is a lack of research on causal effects.

Put those together and the useful conclusion is not “drills are harmful” or “drills are fine.” It is that how a drill is run looks more important than whether one happens — which is good news, because that is the part a school can change.

The Variable That Matters Is How the Drill Is Run

There is a very large difference between a quiet, announced lockdown practice and a drill involving blank rounds fired in a corridor. The word “drill” covers both, which is one reason the research is so hard to read.

The reassuring finding is that the extreme version is rare. Among the teachers RAND surveyed:

• 55 percent said their school’s drills had no realistic elements at all, including no police presence
• 44 percent reported a police or uniformed security presence — by far the most common realistic element
• 6 percent reported sounds of real gunfire and 5 percent officers firing blanks inside the school
• 4 percent reported prop or toy firearms, 1 percent sounds of explosions, and 1 percent fake blood

Where you teach changes the odds considerably: 57 percent of rural teachers said their drills included at least one realistic element, against 46 percent in suburban schools and 32 percent in urban schools. RAND also found that the more realistic elements a school’s drills contained, the more likely a teacher was to report that at least one student had experienced trauma or heightened anxiety afterward.

National guidance has been consistent on this point for years. The joint document from the National Association of School Psychologists, Safe and Sound Schools and the National Association of School Resource Officers recommends announcing drills in advance, matching them to developmental level and prior trauma, and avoiding highly sensorial simulations designed to mimic a real event. The National Academies went further in 2025, recommending that state legislatures and education agencies prohibit the use of deception and high-intensity, high-sensorial simulations outright, and that drills be announced before they begin.

The Part That Rarely Gets Named: You Are the Adult in the Room

Everything above is measurable. This part is not, and we will flag it as practical judgment rather than a research finding — but it is the thing educators describe most consistently when this comes up.

A student in a drill is a participant. You are not. You are responsible for the physical safety of twenty-odd people, for the one who is crying, for the one who is laughing too loudly, and for deciding in real time how calm to appear. Whatever your own body is doing has to be managed and set aside, because the room is reading you. Then the all-clear sounds, and the schedule expects a lesson. There is no structural moment anywhere in that sequence where somebody asks the adult how it went.

This sits inside a broader rise in educator concern about safety. In RAND’s surveys, the share of teachers afraid of being attacked or harmed at school rose from 17 percent in fall 2022 to 24 percent in fall 2023. In fall 2023 that fear was reported by 27 percent of female teachers against 14 percent of male teachers — a gap that had not been there the year before, in a workforce that is roughly three-quarters women. RAND cautions that teachers answering those questions may have had other forms of school violence in mind as well as gun violence.

None of this means a drill is a trauma, and we are not going to tell you it is. It means the job includes an event that asks you to be frightened and composed at the same time, several times a year, and then does not acknowledge that it asked. The exhaustion that comes from holding a steady face while something else is happening underneath is a real occupational cost, and it is closely related to what our page on emotional exhaustion describes.

Schools Are Not Generally Set Up to Catch the Aftermath

This is the clearest and least ambiguous finding in the whole literature, and it is the one most worth bringing to a staff meeting. Asked what resources their school provides around drills, the teachers in RAND’s survey reported:

• 44 percent — the school provides no resources at all before, during or after drills
• 48 percent — discussion-based exercises before a planned drill
• 16 percent — adults monitoring the drill who are trained to remove anyone showing signs of trauma
• 10 percent — mental health support after the drill is over

RAND’s 2025 follow-up, which paired that teacher survey with a fall 2024 survey of 840 principals, found something sharper: principals and teachers describe the same buildings differently. About half of principals said trained adults monitored students for signs of trauma during drills; only 16 percent of teachers reported seeing it. Roughly a third of principals said their schools provided mental health resources or counseling after drills; teachers reported lower rates. Nearly a third of both groups were aware of students experiencing trauma or heightened anxiety following a drill.

On notification, the same report found 83 percent of principals saying teachers get advance notice, against 46 percent for students and 45 percent for parents and guardians. Staff are, in other words, the group most likely to be told — which makes it worth knowing that notice is the norm, and worth asking if you are not getting it.

The pattern across all of it is that drills are near universal and the support around them is not. That gap is a district design problem rather than a personal coping problem, which is the same conclusion our guide to educator wellness programs reaches from a different direction.

Seven Things That Help

These are practical judgment rather than research findings. The studies above establish how common drills are and how uneven the support around them is; they do not prescribe what one teacher should do on the Tuesday a drill is scheduled. What follows is shaped by the specific shape of the event — short, scheduled, repeated, and run by the person who is also inside it.

One thing worth saying plainly: if a drill has left something that is not lifting — sleep that does not return, dread about the building weeks later, replaying you cannot steer away from — the list above is not the right tool. That is a conversation for a licensed professional, and the National Institute of Mental Health’s page on coping with traumatic events is a reliable place to read about what that can look like and how to find help.

What Schools and Districts Control

Four things in the evidence above are squarely within a district’s reach, and none of them require taking a position on whether drills should happen.

Drop the sensorial elements. Blanks, recorded gunfire, prop firearms, fake blood and unannounced simulations run against the NASP, NASRO and Safe and Sound Schools guidance and against the National Academies’ 2025 recommendation. They are also already rare, which means the schools still using them are outliers rather than standard-setters. Announce every drill, to everyone. Staff notice is near universal; student and family notice is close to a coin flip. Both national documents treat advance notice as baseline practice.

Build a staff debrief into the drill plan and put it inside the paid day. Ten minutes, in the schedule, not a voluntary after-school item that the people who most need it will skip. Close the perception gap. RAND’s 2025 finding that principals and teachers describe the same supports so differently is worth taking literally: a support nobody in the classroom knows about is functionally a support that does not exist. Districts that want to offer counseling without building it in-house can look at school district partnerships.

Frequently Asked Questions