Minnesota districts work to take the trauma out of school shooter drills

DULUTH – A couple of minutes into a recent school lockdown drill, a group of 11th-graders huddled in the back of a darkened classroom in complete silence.

The door handle suddenly jiggled, cracking through the quiet and sending a tremor through the students.

Lee Kruger’s international studies class at Duluth East High School had scurried from their desks and away from the door after a voice over the intercom announced the drill. Minutes later, the school’s assistant principals and other staff moved through the building to test door locks.

Unlike drills in some schools across the country, there was no pretend shooter carrying a Nerf gun here. Students weren’t instructed to drag heavy furniture in front of the door as a barricade. Nobody practiced throwing objects at a fake assailant.

As school leaders try to balance safety preparedness with the trauma that just practicing for a shooting may cause students, the blueprint for school shooting drills has begun swinging in a gentler direction in recent years.

The new approach emphasizes muscle memory in a mindful way. It’s a marked difference from some drills across the country — which have even included fake blood and pellet guns — that sprung up more than a dozen years ago after 20 first-graders were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.

“Our intent was to try to make sure we were the most prepared we could be, and I think we were misguided,” said Pat Hamilton of the I Love U Guys Foundation, a national nonprofit that provides free active threat training materials to schools.

Student safety has been top of mind for many in Minnesota since the August shooting at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis that claimed the lives of two children and injured more than two dozen people.

In recent years, several Minnesota districts — including Duluth, Brainerd, St. Louis Park and Prior Lake — have implemented the gentler active-threat protocol from the I Love U Guys Foundation, considered a national leader on training institutions how to respond to threats. Other districts, such as St. Cloud, are looking to make the switch.

School lockdown drills have become commonplace across Minnesota in the last two decades, after deadly shootings at Rocori High School in central Minnesota in 2003 and Red Lake High School in northern Minnesota in 2005.

Typically, that has meant locking doors, turning off lights and crouching under desks or behind shelves.

Then around 2012, federal agencies started promoting “run-hide-fight” training, as well as a similar protocol called ALICE (alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate). They expanded responses to include the options of running to safety or fighting, if necessary.

The parents of 16-year-old Emily Keyes, who was shot and killed by a gunman at Platte Canyon High School in Colorado two decades ago, created the I Love U Guys Foundation to design a common language and set of actions for responding to emergencies. It’s named after the last message Emily sent parents Ellen and John-Michael Keyes.

The organization launched a standard response with simple actions for different types of scenarios: hold in place to keep hallways clear, secure people inside the building, lockdown inside classrooms, evacuate the building or shelter in cases of severe weather.

The system is more nuanced to differentiate between responses for a police chase in a neighborhood vs. medical incidents inside the school. Students can go into “hold” or “secure” and continue activities in the classroom without going into lockdown.

“Not every crisis in a school is going to be related to an active assailant,” Hamilton said.

But when they do need to go into a lockdown, the protocol teaches a simple phrase — “locks, lights, out of sight” — based on recommendations from the Sandy Hook Advisory Committee, which found the safest place in a school shooting was behind a locked classroom door.

“We were kind of seeing things all over the place,” said Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley.

The law restricts active shooter simulations with officers and staff to times when a majority of students aren’t at school. It also requires that districts provide advance notice of active shooter drills, lets families opt their children out of the drills and mandates that staff debrief students.

Maye Quade said she’s heard from parents that young students, seeing reports of a mass shooting, might say, “That happened at my school last week.” But “what they’re reporting is actually a drill but they were too young to know the difference. They thought it was real, which can be traumatic.”

The St. Cloud school district moved away from intense physical drills about six years ago. Now, students and teachers simply have conversations about what to do in the case of an active threat.

But the district plans to add back physical drills next year using the I Love U Guys system, said Matthew Boucher, district operations director.

The state Education Department recommends the I Love U Guys system.

At GFW Public Schools in south-central Minnesota, staff will be training with I Love U Guys in January and combining it with the district’s existing ALICE response that focuses on the hands-on reactions needed in the heat of the moment, said Superintendent Allen Berg.

“The I Love U Guys, it’s a little more friendly for the kids,” he said. “And then ALICE will be the supplemental pieces with what we need to do for fighting back.”

In Brainerd, Superintendent Peter Grant said the district is working closely with county emergency management officials to prepare for shootings like a natural disaster. As it implements I Love U Guys, a big component is sharing a reunification plan.

“The first thing [parents] want to do is rush to the school. Well actually, that’s the worst thing to do,” Grant said. “But we have to give them the terminology and the procedure we’re going to use so that they understand … should we ever have to use it.”

“At the same time, I think you’re going to do whatever your instincts tell you,” she said.

Kruger, the Duluth teacher, keeps a box of hockey pucks and rope in his classroom in case he ever needs to defend his students or help them escape.

“I think they get annoyed with drills,” he said. “But I also think they know it’s part of their life.”