When the words “Lockdown. This is not a drill” echoed over the intercom, Kellen Lewis’s four children knew what to do, he said.
The teachers made sure the doors were locked, and the students moved to to corners of the classrooms, hiding silently where they could not be seen from the doorway. In Mr. Lewis’s third-grade son’s class, the teacher stood between the door and the students armed with a pair of scissors, ready to defend against anyone attempting to enter.
“They had a strategy, and that strategy probably helped save some lives,” Mr. Lewis said.
The shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., left one student and one teacher dead, with at least six others injured. However, precautions taken by the school may have prevented the shooter from harming even more people, officials said.
Barbara Wiers, a school official, said at a new conference on Monday that Abundant Life conducted lockdown and evacuation drills and that both faculty and students were familiar with the procedures. Just before the start of the school year, employees participated in an updated training session with local authorities, she said.
“While we had never hoped to actually employ them, today they helped keep students safe,” she said of the trainings.
The school also had cameras that were regularly monitored, and all students were “visually scanned” upon arrival each day, she said. Security protocols, including always keeping the school doors locked, were followed. However, the school does not have metal detectors.
“The students handled themselves magnificently,” Ms. Wiers said, adding, “They were clearly scared.”
The precautions at Abundant Life reflect efforts that schools nationwide have made as the number of gun incidents continue to rise, though there is little evidence that these measures prevent gun violence. Nearly all schools now conduct lockdown drills, and they are spending billions on security measures, including electronic locks and surveillance systems.
At Apalachee High School in Georgia, where two teachers and two students were killed in a shooting in early September, officials credited a new alert system — featuring ID badges with panic buttons — with helping save lives.
Mr. Lewis, whose children range from pre-K to sixth grade, said the preparations helped keep them composed during the lockdown — even when one of them heard someone running down the hallway shouting, “Active shooter, lock your doors.”
He said the younger children didn’t even realize there was a shooter. When police arrived, they told the younger ones it had been a fight, not a shooting, he said.
Now, as Mr. Lewis, a pastor, helps his children process what happened, he’s reassuring them that they did the right thing and focusing on the actions they took.
“It gave my kids that very important sense of agency — that no matter what was going on, they knew what to do,” he said.
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