“Lock down! Lock down! Active shooter. This is not a drill,” the principal’s voice announced in an eerily calm manner across the static of the school intercom system.
My heart dropped in fear. Immediately, my friend and I ran into our classroom, as the next period was just about to begin.
I’d heard about recent shootings at other schools. We’d even watched videos about what to do in these situations. But I’d never imagined it would happen at my school.
My muscles remained stiff and my breathing rapid and shallow.
Full of adrenaline, my classmates and I quickly began to shut and lock doors and turn off all lights in the room. My teacher quietly took attendance to “find out where every duckling was” and passed out suckers.
She then stood by the door with a broomstick, ready to sacrifice herself for any one of us.
My heart skipped a beat as I realized only half of my classmates had made it into the classroom before the announcement was made and the doors shut. That meant they were stuck in an open space, looking for a safe place to hide.
As my friend and I sat together in the dark holding hands, I couldn’t stop thinking about my other friends. My little brother — our first week of school in the same building — had just started at the school this year. Was he okay?
Suddenly, we heard a banging on the doors. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Even though my palms were sweaty, I couldn’t let go of my friend’s hand.
Was this it? Was I going to die? Were one of my friends going to die?
With both horror and relief, we realized the banging at the door was our classmates trying to get into class, shouting, “We need to find somewhere safe!”
I made eye contact with my teacher. She desperately wanted to open the door. To let them in and help them feel safe. But every active shooter training she had ever taken specifically instructed her — and all staff — to keep the doors closed once they were shut, no matter who was on the other side.
For forty minutes, my classmates and I waited. We couldn’t answer each other’s questions. Nobody could in that moment. Not a single person knew if we’d be safe. Everyone was completely silent.
And even though it was terrifying, we all waited for the even scarier sounds of gunshots. Screams. Sirens.
— Written in collaboration with my daughter, Amelia, who generously allowed me to share her story
During the first week of the school year, I found myself as a parent trying to help my children process the terror after there was an active shooter threat at their school.
As described above, my daughter sat in a corner of her chorus classroom with the lights off and doors locked, while my son and his classmates stuffed themselves into a closet. Other students crouched under their desks.
Although the threat fortunately ended up being just that — a threat without an actual weapon — there were approximately 300 students in the building who, for forty minutes, thought they might die. At school.
Both of my kids, as well as other students we know well, were affected mentally by this threat and associated lockdown. Intense fear. Anxiety. Headaches and stomachaches. Absenteeism. Inability to concentrate. Loss of appetite. Difficulty sleeping.
For students involved in an actual school shooting, the evidence is disturbing. According to research, exposure to this type of violence increases the likelihood for lower test scores, decreased school enrollment for up to three years, increased absenteeism, and mental health struggles, including depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
But often overlooked are students involved in threats of violence, where their school building is locked down. These events are far more common and their effects on students’ mental health can’t be understated.
According to a report by the Civic Research Institute, the more children perceive their lives or the lives of loved ones to be threatened, the higher are their reports of PTSD symptoms, even though no one may have actually been injured.
Additionally, a 2025 preprint from the Journal of School Health found that youth who experienced a school lockdown due to a violent or firearm-related threat — even without gunfire — showed significantly higher anxiety, somatic and stress symptoms than those who hadn’t.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) utilized by the American Psychiatric Association to diagnose mental health disorders defines Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as developing after “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence.” That includes situations where a person believes death or serious harm is imminent, even if it’s later revealed to be a false alarm.
As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, what imprints trauma in the brain is the subjective experience of helplessness and terror, not necessarily the objective danger. In other words, students don’t have to witness or be physically affected by the violence to experience trauma.
When a child hides in a classroom closet, believing that someone with a gun might enter, their body doesn’t distinguish between threat and reality. The fear, psychological stress response, and memory consolidation that follow are the same pathways seen in trauma from actual violence.
Sadly, a 2024 Pew Research survey demonstrated that about 1 in 4 teachers in the US say that their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the prior school year.
While there isn’t a central registry to tally school lockdowns, there were at least 2,058 threats of school violence logged by media-confirmed reports during the 2024-25 school year. Even more concerning, these threats are considered underreported because they are now so commonplace that they are less likely to be reported by media.
Numbers like these can feel abstract until we consider their human meaning. Even if we take this conservative number of threats and apply a conservative number of students per threat at 50, that is 102,900 students who were potentially affected. 102,900 scared children — children hiding in closets, under desks, and in restrooms. Children predisposed to developing a mental health disorder.
Over and over in the news and in the community, I hear that our children are in mental health crisis.
The Kaiser Family Foundation and Johns Hopkins both emphasize that gun violence exposure at school is a major, often underestimated driver of youth mental health challenges.
While schools, including the school my children attend, do an amazing job with services such as counseling, we have to get better at preventing violence or threats of violence from happening in the first place.
Death is not the only potential result of gun violence, or the threat of violence, at schools.
We must do better.
We are not protecting our children.
Sources
Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students’ Human Capital and Economic Outcomes
The Impact of Gun Violence on Children and Adolescents | KFF
Gun Violence in the United States 2023
Violent Threats and Incidents in Schools — The Educator’s School Safety Network
van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York, NY: Penguin Books.