I spent my career as an eighth-grade science teacher and School Safety Director, and if there’s one thing I heard from teachers more than any other, it’s some version of this: “Nobody ever taught me how to do this.”
They’re right. A traditional education degree will train a teacher to manage a classroom, differentiate instruction, and assess a struggling reader. It will not, in almost any program in this country, spend a single credit hour on what to do when the fire alarm means something other than a drill, how to talk to a nine-year-old about a lockdown without terrifying her, or how to recognize the quiet warning signs a student gives off weeks before a crisis. Safety training, when it happens at all, gets bolted on after the fact — a staff meeting in August, a laminated card taped inside a desk drawer, an assembly nobody asked for.
Into that gap has stepped an entire industry of consultants, and some of them have made a bet that fear is the fastest way to make a lesson stick. Simulated gunfire. Unannounced drills that send students diving under desks in genuine terror. Graphic worst-case scenarios delivered to a room of fourteen-year-olds with no warning and no counselor in the building. I understand the instinct. I real emergency is frightening, so the argument goes that practice should be too. I’ve watched this approach up close for years, and I don’t believe it. Fear is a terrible teacher. It spikes cortisol, shuts down the reasoning part of the brain we’re actually trying to train, and teaches students to associate school safety with dread instead of competence. Ask any teacher who has sat with a shaking student after a “realistic” drill whether it builds confidence. It didn’t. It built a memory of being scared, with no plan attached to it.
What Actually Works…
What actually works is almost boringly simple: calm, repeated, age-appropriate practice. A kindergartner doesn’t need to understand why a lockdown happens, She needs to know that “the quiet game” means find your circle spot and use your quiet mouse voice, and that a grown-up has a plan. A sixth grader is a different student than an eighth grader; running the same script for both means it lands correctly for neither. A high schooler can handle a direct, adult conversation about reporting a threat or helping a friend in crisis, but that conversation still needs a counselor in the room and a script that never asks a sixteen-year-old to describe violence in detail to prove they understood the lesson. None of this requires an alarm, a startle, or a single simulated danger. It requires a short scenario, a few honest questions, and the chance to physically practice just the first step, over and over, until it’s boring.
Boring is the goal.
Boring means it’s a habit instead of a trauma.
The teachers I worked with weren’t asking for more fear. They were asking for a plan. They want a curriculum they could actually follow, written for the age of the kids in front of them, that didn’t require them to become trauma counselors overnight or improvise a threat assessment on the fly. Give a teacher that, and something changes. She stops being a bystander waiting for someone else’s training to kick in, and starts being the calm, competent adult in the room her students already believe she is. Empowerment, not fear, is what makes a drill something a staff can trust and a student can survive. Not just physically, but with their sense of safety in that building still intact afterward.
Our schools don’t have a shortage of urgency around safety. They have a shortage of good curriculum. That’s a solvable problem, and it starts with recognizing that the fastest lesson isn’t always the one that lasts.
Have Questions? Want Help Making Your School Safer?
Contact me for help developing plans to make your school safer in a boring, habit-forming way.
