Twenty years after the Columbine High School massacre, students raised in an era of mass shootings are attuned to any potential threat, reports the Denver Post. The newspaper’s analysis of lockout and lockdown data compiled from the state’s 25 largest school districts shows it’s a rare week when students aren’t shuttered inside a building to protect them from a threat. For the 18 school districts that provided at least two years of data, the number of reported lockouts — incidents where the doors were locked, but classes continued as normal — rose by 52 percent from the 2016-17 school year to the 2017-18 school year. Typically, they resulted from police activity in the area, but districts also kept students inside because bears or coyotes had wandered into the neighborhood.
Lockdowns increased by 55 percent in that time for those districts, though they only accounted for about one of every seven incidents. In most cases, lockdowns were a response to a perceived threat inside a school. About 10 percent were because someone accidentally hit an alarm. The data are almost certainly an undercount, because many districts don’t track security incidents, but it does provide a small window into the experiences of Colorado students. “It’s become as routine as fire drills,” said Melissa Craven, director of emergency management at Denver Public Schools, whose 220 lockouts last year were tops among all districts. “We don’t have many students that have started their academic career with us who aren’t used to lockdowns.”