NJ Students Participate in Active Shooter Drill: An active shooter drill was held in Hoboken High School Wednesday.

Active Shooter Drill- Hoboken High School (May 23, 2018)

On Wednesday, May 23, the Hoboken Police Department, in partnership with The Hoboken Board of Education, conducted a school safety drill at Hoboken High School. This was a training exercise for first responders, school staff, and students. Various public safety resources were utilized during the drill. 
Some of the drill was reported on by WNBC-New York:



The role of active shooter drills and the impact they have on children is becoming an area of research over the past few years.

This from a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly--- Of course, general lockdown and disaster drills have a long history; a generation of Americans came of age hiding under desks from nuclear bombs. While the idea of such a maneuver protecting a person from a bomb blast or nuclear fallout became fodder for jokes, the drills themselves had insidious effects on kids’ senses of safety. Some teachers reported that students’ artwork changed to feature mushroom clouds and sometimes the child’s own death, bringing a pervasive sense of danger into the places where kids most need to feel safe.

Despite some similarities to natural-disaster and Cold War drills, active-shooter drills also mean exposing kids to the idea that at any point, someone they know may try to kill them.

Active Shooter Drill-- Hoboken High School May 23, 2018

“It’s good to do emergency drills, but active shooters are not a drill anyone should have to do,” says Meredith Corley, who taught math in Colorado in the aftermath of Columbine. “It re-traumatizes kids who have experienced violence. Getting the kids settled back into the work of learning after lockdown drills is a nightmare. That mind-set has no place in a learning environment.”

“I was slightly too young for bomb drills, but in greater Kansas City, tornado drills were de rigueur,” says Lily Alice, a Midwesterner born in 1965. “We did have tornados now and then. The difference, of course, is that no one stockpiles them to use against other people, and weather forecasts mitigated some fear.”

Colleen Derkatch, an associate professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, studies how we assess risk when it comes to our health. “The more prepared we are, the more heightened our sense of risk,” she told me. “And one potential effect we haven’t considered is how these kinds of preparedness activities affect kids psychologically, and could increase a sense of feeling at risk. They really expand the ways in which we feel increasingly under siege.”

Active Shooter Drill-- Hoboken High School May 23, 2018

To a large degree-- the entire country is feeling their way in the dark when it comes to the issue of school shootings and how to prevent them. Active shooter drills are certainly part of the "new normal" in New Jersey and around the country. Intentions are certainly good and well meaning. Hopefully, additional research may offer insights into these drills, their impact, and how our children can be best protected.