The morbid events at Columbine High School in 1999 paved a new fear in communities nationwide: school shootings. Since then, schools around the country, including Loudoun County Public Schools, have heightened security measures in order to secure the safety of children in schools.

Lockdown drills are a familiar process to any child in school. At Dominion, the drill is to lock the door, put a shade over the window, and sit in a corner of a dark classroom and this is all done with knowledge of the drill beforehand. After the grisly attack on elementary students at Sandy Hook though, other schools around the country have employed real life, unannounced, shooter simulations.

This would mean having a pretend shooter trying to get into classrooms and having police come in to diffuse the situation. The purpose of these simulations are so that students don’t just take lockdown drills as a joke and would have a better understanding of what to do if a school shooting ever happened.

When asked if LCPS would take this kind of action, LCPS Supervisor of Safety & Security Suzanne Devlin says no because she worries that, if a shooting ever did occur, people would just think that it was another drill. “I would rather people understood if they ever witnessed a person with a gun in the midst of an armed assault they would know it was real and not a drill,” Devlin said.

She believes that the approach that Dominion has towards lockdown drills is more successful because of the calm atmosphere surrounding drills here as opposed to the commotion that a simulation would produce because “if habits are formed about how to react when there is low stress, when the crisis occurs, everyone will just move as they have been drilling.”

Additional upcoming security measures are already in review. In fact, the county is in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security on many projects. One project currently in review is “Run-Hide-Fight” which Devlin says is training that “supports student evacuation where appropriate during an Active Violent Incident.”

This training is soon to be implemented in Loudoun County schools. She believes even simple measures like throwing objects at a shooter can save many lives, and reiterates that violent people can always be stopped if we work together and are trained not to freeze up, all which will be addressed in the Run-Hide-Fight training.

“There are many extraordinary stories where LCPS personnel have stopped bad things from happening” says Devlin, which she attributes to the National DHS program “If You See Something, Say Something”. She is proud to state that these incidents have been stopped because someone took the initiative to “tell someone about a person in crisis or someone odd at a bus stop or near the school or a Facebook or Twitter feed that suggests a threat against a school.”

While a school shooting is a threat that can happen to people at any school, we shouldn’t be living in fear. Loudoun County has put in effect measures to keep us all safe. Precautions like Ai phone technology and panic buttons for front desk personnel are all installed to ensure maximum safety for its students and staff. With all of this in effect, Devlin wants to emphasize the importance of taking drills seriously and that they can be the factor between life and death.

“Participating in drills and knowing where safe evacuation areas contribute to survival rates” reminding us not to take drills as just a joke.