Anja Herrman, a 17-year-old high school senior in Chicago, says active-school shooter drills have become “as commonplace as a pep rally or an elementary school field day” for those growing up in the United States.
These drills require staff and students to practice specific emergency procedures, including locking down in a designated area, turning off lights, staying quiet, tactics like fighting back, distracting a shooter, and evacuating. The drills have become a standard part of how many schools prepare for active-shooter incidents, which occur with alarming regularity and fatal consequences on campuses nationwide.
Thus far in 2023, there have been more than 280 school shooting incidents, defined as any time a gun is brandished, fired, or a bullet hits school property, according to researcher David Riedman and The Violence Project, which runs the K-12 School Shooting Database.
Education Week, an independent news organization, also tallies incidents, but counts only those wherein a firearm is discharged during school hours or at a school-sponsored event and a person, not including the suspect or perpetrator, sustains a bullet wound. Education Week's tracker includes 33 school shootings and 56 casualties so far this year.
While active-shooter drills have been a norm throughout Herrman’s education, she says, they have also made her realize she doesn’t “fit the mold of normal.” As a wheelchair user, she has found that the safety plans rehearsed during active-shooter drills are not designed with her primarily in mind. “I always have this fear in the back of my head. [If a shooter comes to my school,] Will I be left behind?”
Many disabled students, teachers, and staff share Herrman’s concern, according to experts and advocates Teen Vogue has interviewed. Their experiences show that disabled people are often excluded from emergency-preparedness planning, and the resulting plans often fail to consider their needs. Nationwide, this leaves the 7.3 million students with disabilities who attend public K-12 schools more vulnerable in the event of a school shooting.
Some organizations, including the National Education Association, Everytown for Gun Safety, and its student branch, Students Demand Action, are trying to address the problem at its root, emphasizing the importance of nationwide gun safety legislation to limit gun violence in school communities. They also have ideas for micro-level interventions that could improve outcomes for disabled students in the event of a school shooting.
A vital step is creating individualized and comprehensive active-shooter response plans for disabled students. Says Herrman, at her school, she is expected to follow the standard emergency protocol, which is “Be quiet, turn off the lights, sit down." But with her wheelchair, she notes, “I’m higher off the ground than everyone else, so I’m always terrified that someone will see the wheelchair and know to come into the classroom. I don’t want my wheelchair to be a liability.”
Megan Egstad, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Madison, Wisconsin, uses a wheelchair or forearm crutches and has a medical-alert dog. They say there is no specific plan for them during a shooting event. “I was talking to friends who were like, ‘Well, I can help you find a way to get down the stairs,’ but it’s not really the most helpful to just have someone try to help you down the stairs as fast as possible while your life’s in danger.” The school confirms this in an email to Teen Vogue.
If a school does not have sufficient plans in place, issues such as how a wheelchair user should evacuate during a real emergency are often left to be solved by friends, teachers, or staff. “The responsibility is just so enormous,” says fourth-grade teacher Abbey Clements, who is a survivor of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and executive director and cofounder of Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence. “Being a human shield is not in the teacher-prep work that I did prior to being a teacher, but if you teach in America, it seems like that’s something that could happen.”
Both the National Education Association (NEA) and Egstad, speaking as a volunteer for Students Demand Action, say that more comprehensive safety plans should be established as part of a student’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) or Section 504 plan, legal documents required to ensure disabled students receive needed services and access to learning environments in public schools.
Herrman underscores the need for students to be involved in developing those plans: “Disability isn’t one size fits all, and plans need to be individualized and created by and with the students,” she says. “We’re the ones that know what we need to feel safe in our school environment.”
Becky Pringle, president of the NEA, says that stigmatizing beliefs about disabled students sometimes prevent the meaningful inclusion of those students. “Too many people believe the[se students] can’t do things and don’t give them credit for what they can do,” Pringle says. As educators, “we need to make sure that they are prepared to exercise their own agency to help put in place a plan to keep them safe, so they are a part of it, they own it, and they know what to do.”
According to the NEA, safety protocols for disabled students must also be revised regularly based on proactive and collaborative need assessments that include students, their families, and relevant professionals, such as school nurses, psychologists, and counselors. After plans are in place, they should be reviewed often and made accessible to all relevant faculty and staff during emergencies, rather than being held only in a school’s central administrative office, as is often the case now.
Experts emphasize the importance of ongoing and proactive school safety planning, but some also question whether the current drills are effective. Today, active-shooter drills are implemented in over 95% of K-12 schools and required in at least 40 states, according to Everytown. However, research shows, these drills may have harmful effects on the mental health of those who experience them. The anxiety and depression many students face following an active-shooter drill can be amplified for disabled students who know that plans are often insufficient to protect them during a real emergency. Says Egstad, “It adds to the fear and trauma we all face during drills anyway.”
A recent report from Everytown, in partnership with the American Federation of Teachers and the NEA, recommended prioritizing proven school safety strategies, including threat-assessment programs, access to mental health professionals and social support, and non-punitive disciplinary processes over active-shooter drills, which only have potential-but-unproven benefits, according to the report.
Ultimately, even the district- or school-level interventions that could support disabled students, like developing individualized educational lockdown plans and deprioritizing distressing active-shooter drills, would benefit from top-down support. To make the needs of disabled students clear to the US Congress, Herrman led a study looking into active-shooter response plans at schools nationwide, co-publishing a white paper with policy recommendations, including mandating individualized educational lockdown plans and funding further research. “This is such a broad issue," she says. "We need to be examining it from lots of different angles, and that requires more research, more care, and more attention.”
There are also structural issues that impede the effective implementation of things like individualized educational lockdown plans. According to the NEA, because of growing class sizes and the national teacher shortage — which is partly due to unlivable wages for educators — many teachers no longer have sufficient dedicated time to participate in developing and reviewing safety protocols. The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, existing federal legislation that could play a role in meeting the needs of disabled students, has been underfunded since it was enacted in 1975.
Says Herrman, it is long past time for those in power at every level to take action on the issue. “Disabled students don’t deserve to have their disability be a death sentence in a school shooting,” she adds. “We need to put in place policies that make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take
