Kendrick Castillo, an 18-year old student at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado, was watching The Princess Bride in his British lit class when classmate Devon Erickson, one of two armed shooters — both students at the school — entered the classroom in May brandishing a handgun. Castillo charged at the shooter, attempting to wrest the weapon from him. Two more students followed his lead. They managed to disarm the attacker, but not before Castillo himself was shot twice. He died at the scene, the day’s only fatality.
This fall, 30 miles away, a security consultant in Golden, Colorado, at a school Castillo never attended, put the boy’s name up on a chalkboard as an example of heroism in the face of death.
As school shooting incidents continue to rise — in 2018, more than 55 people were killed by gun violence in schools; the previous high, in 1993, was 40 — at least 42 states have passed laws requiring schools to train students and teachers for an attack. According to the National Center for Education Studies, a near-universal 94.6 percent of districts offer a variation of shooter training. Some kids learn to run and hide as early as preschool. Others are told to follow in Castillo’s footsteps and attempt to physically attack a shooter as a last resort.
Asking a child, or even a teacher, to overpower someone with a gun seems like extreme advice. But active-shooter training companies and security consulting firms like Denver’s TAC*ONE, Strategos International in Kansas City, Kansas, and Medina, Ohio’s ALICE Training Institute each teach a variation on this emergency response in schools. It’s rooted in a 2013 Department of Homeland Security guide for dealing with active shooters that says “adults in immediate danger should consider trying to disrupt or incapacitate the shooter by using aggressive force and items in their environment, such as fire extinguishers, and chairs.” It’s the “absolute last resort,” the guide warned, an option only if victims are trapped and desperate.
Joe Deedon, founder of TAC*ONe, has said the Castillo attack gave the industry confidence to instruct students to do what was once only asked of adults. “It changed the game,” he told the Mountain West News Bureau, adding that while some rural and charter schools had embraced fighting as a tactic, most districts were timid. But Castillo, who likely saved the lives of his classmates that day, became the ultimate argument that rushing the shooter — and with it, a whole system of largely untested methods — might actually work.
Active-shooter training consultants are still covered in the media as a dark novelty. Private security trade magazine Campus Safety has a complete, still unpublished, 2019 survey of more than 1,200 schools, hospitals, and universities, which found 81 percent had either adopted new lockdown practices or upgraded existing policies and shelters, according to Robin Hattersley-Gray, the magazine’s editor-in-chief.
Many — some flush with cash from last year’s STOP School Violence Act — have turned to active-shooter consultants to conduct drills. Though ALICE is the biggest company to offer such training for a price, there are dozens of smaller businesses following a similar model. Bookings of active-shooter trainings are expected to spike this school year, which began weeks after mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, left 31 dead.
It’s a case of an industry meeting demand. But for school districts, some of which are now mandated to pay for such training, the marketplace has grown faster than the evidence, and despite arguments that it can heighten anxiety and trauma for children. After more than a decade of mainstream practice and millions billed to public schools, there’s a troubling lack of data backing a program taught to students at more than 3,700 K-12 students and 900 universities learning the ALICE way. Currently, that means fighting back.
Every time a Parkland or Newtown tragedy happens, the national reaction is more or less the same: There’s outrage, sadness, shock that we aren’t more shocked, then demands for our government to do something — followed by the certainty that no one actually will. For now, regular mass shootings are a problem that we’ve left the free market to solve. Schools under pressure to do everything they can to prepare for violence are inundated with training program options.
Most classes hit the same beats. School staff members are taught to recognize escape routes, what a gunshot sounds like (and how it’s often confused for something much more benign), and how to barricade doors. They learn seemingly esoteric survival trivia, like how the best way to break a window to escape is to smash the glass in the upper right-hand corner. Most schools do this once a year. But without a national database or set standards, it’s impossible to say exactly how often drills are practiced or at what age they start. We know there are schools where children as young as 5 participate.
Then there are more extreme drills. Take Raisin, California, where school superintendent Juan Sandoval worried that after a few years’ practice, the school’s active-shooter simulation felt too routine. “You have your security plan, you tuck it away, and it collects dust,” he says. “If there is not a spontaneous reaction, then we’re not really preparing them.” To solve this, he approved a plan in February 2019 to costume a school janitor with a mask and a fake gun to run the drill. It certainly provoked a spontaneous reaction: Local news later reported that teachers were terrified and children sobbed.
Sandoval stands by his reasoning. “If we don’t really test our systems to see what works, we are being irresponsible,” he said, adding that teachers were warned in advance that the February drill would be different. He also says he believes that breaking protocol exposes flaws: The school’s PA system set off an active-shooter alarm indistinguishable from the school’s fire drill alarm, and running the alert through the phone system blocked the ability to call out. Now every classroom is equipped with a two-way radio.
Not every experiment has that kind of silver lining. Students in a Pennsylvania school district were issued buckets of rocks last year to defend themselves, which one anonymous student described as “comical.” Another school had someone dress up in stereotypical Middle Eastern garb to scare the faculty. Another school splattered fake blood on the walls. One Montana teacher sued her district, claiming a drill’s gunshot simulations gave her tinnitus.
Though there are no rules saying law enforcement has to be involved in any of this, those interviewed for this story said that most districts reach out to their local police departments to coordinate the training even if it’s a program designed by a third party like ALICE. This might help mitigate the teachers’ lack of tactical expertise, but can also go badly. In March, Indiana teachers said they were bruised and traumatized after being forced to kneel down and be shot “execution style” with plastic pellets as part of an active-shooter drill conducted by the county’s sheriff’s department. (The teachers were asked in advance if they wanted to participate in the exercise, and one of the reasons they went along was because they trusted the police officers administering the training.)
“They told us, ‘This is what happens if you just cower and do nothing. They shot all of us across our backs. I was hit four times,” one teacher told the Indianapolis Star.
The sheriff has since removed mock executions. But drills continue as schools increasingly need them to stay accredited.
“We have drills for fires and tornados, but we don’t set the building on fire and we don’t tear the roof off the gym,” says Keith Gambill, vice-president of the Indiana State Teachers Association. “And yet we do have bad storms, a lot more than we have shootings, and we manage to keep the kids safe in those situations.”
“Schools don’t have a lot of resources as it is, and we want to do the best we can. Where the state can come in is to help us vet some of these experts,” he added. “Help give us a sense of what to do.”
It’s tricky to evaluate an expert in an industry that can’t agree on its own best practices. When the police who sprayed Indiana’s teachers faced criticism, they cited their ALICE certification, which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate.
The ALICE Training Institute is the country’s largest peddler of this model, which has been tailored for everything from churches to hospitals to city halls. Founded in 2000 by former law-enforcement officer Greg Crane in the wake of the Columbine high-school shooting, it offers “online training blended together with onsite, instructor-led demonstrations, practical scenarios, and evaluation drills.”
It’s also the model that tells students and teachers they should prepare, as an absolute last resort, to fight off the shooter — the “C” in the acronym. Evacuation should be the priority if it’s possible, and locking yourself down is the second-best option. Still, if it’s life or death, you’re encouraged to go down swinging. Instructors like to endorse bravery by saying that most gunshot wounds are survivable. This is true, except when it comes to the assault weapons favored by mass shooters, because their magazine capacity means they’re capable of firing more rounds at once, lending them a higher fatality rate.
According to the ALICE Training Institute, the group has trained more than one million people in every state and has thousands of certified trainers. While popular, the ALICE method still isn’t dominant, though the exact market share of any method is as uncertain as its reliability.
In a statement released after the Indiana drill, the ALICE Training Institute, which was not present for the training, said one of the program’s selling points is that it’s easily adaptable to individual schools and it trusts local trainers to make the call. The institute did not respond to interview requests for this story.
For trainers, ALICE certification has the potential to be quite lucrative. The training program reportedly cost an Anchorage, Alaska, school district $56,000 for its first year, plus $25,000 for each of the next two years of training renewal. In states that have legally mandated shooter training, thousands of districts who trust the ALICE standard are redirecting funds.
And there’s virtually no evidence about its effectiveness. “There’s what you would call a paucity of data,” says Kenneth Trump, a longtime critic of the program and himself a rival school safety consultant. “Anything anyone tells you is anecdotal.”
It doesn’t help that many of the people associated with taking on a shooter can no longer speak for themselves. University of North Carolina Charlotte student Riley Howell was killed rushing a mass shooter on campus in June, but, like Castillo, is credited as a hero. This summer, after shooting and killing two people, a gunman was taken out by employees in a Southaven, Mississippi, Walmart, where active-shooter drills are performed regularly. The retail giant introduced mandatory training in 2015, and employees are required to pass a computer refresher once every quarter.
“There is still no national standard for this,” says B.J. Bilbo, president of the National Association of School Safety and Law Enforcement Officials. “There’s no data. We are trying to organize something. We’re in the process of polling schools across the country, but we’re not there yet.” The association runs the National School Safety Conference, which held its 51st annual meeting in July. “You see some people at the conferences talking about their personal plan for school safety, and I’m sure some do mean well, but whether a school should pay them, I can’t say.” (The group has its own ties to the emergency response industry, but none involved in shooting drills.)
Part of the reason for the lack of data is that until 2018, Congress had effectively banned the Centers for Disease Control from studying gun violence as a public health issue by withholding funding.
ALICE certification also allows local trainers to pass responsibility up the chain, which can be attractive to school districts that want to avoid lawsuits. And here, the question of whether any of this actually needs to work doesn’t really matter.
“Say a shooting happens and you’re sued for negligence,” says Kenneth Trump, the ALICE critic. “You don’t want to go to court without that piece of paper showing that you tried.”
Following the 2018 Parkland shooting, Education Week reported more than 100 pending civil suits were filed. No security companies were named, but those served included the school district, the shooter, the estate of the shooter’s late mother, three separate mental health agencies, and the company that manufactured and sold the AR-15 used in the shooting.
It’s also easy to get certified, as the institute offers an online course for those who can’t fly to an on-site training and can easily be finished at home within an hour. It’s like getting ordained. It’ll cost you $30 online — it took a reporter for Vox about an hour to be certified — and you’ll earn money with it if people take a leap of faith.
Even if your district is opposed to telling students to fight a shooter, you might end up with ALICE training anyway. When 14 students and three adults were killed in the Parkland massacre, Floridians wanted to do something. State legislators overwhelmingly passed controversial school safety legislation, which partly included expanding funding for school safety reviews in the state’s 74 districts. One contract was awarded to SafePlans, a Florida-based business known for alert systems. The costs for a single school to consolidate preparedness and drill management with SafePlans ran as high as $65,000 for a year with a recurring annual cost of $41,000.
In July, after that contract was awarded, the ALICE Training Institute announced it was buying the company for an undisclosed sum. SafePlans’ site now lists it as ALICE-certified.
Besides the cost of training, districts can also be hit by lawsuits. Iowa insurance company EMC reportedly paid out more than $250,000 in 2010 to settle claims by teachers injured in drills. The state legally requires training, though that law leaves all the details of what that training means to individual districts and offers no additional funding to cover the cost. Several have already reported partnering with ALICE certified police trainers to iron out the details.
“This is not something provided in their budgets,” said Iowa state representative Wes Breckenridge. “They have to find the money on their own.” Last year, President Trump signed into law the STOP School Violence program, which, among other things, provides some federal funding for school safety training.
Meanwhile, students’ therapy services have languished in a state ranking 49th in access to mental health care services. About 28 percent of mass shooting witnesses develop PTSD and another third develop acute distress disorder, according to the National Center for PTSD. “Trauma from mass shooting is another area we really haven’t figured out yet,” says Sherrie Lawson, who survived the Washington Navy Yard shooting in 2013 and now works with the trauma support network Rebel Group. “I remember going to see a therapist and how he told me he didn’t know how to help me because there just weren’t people like me to learn from. He didn’t have the numbers.”
There are traumatic mental-health effects of the drills themselves, exemplified by the Oregon teacher who sued the school system after an active-shooter drill, arguing that she wasn’t told about the drill in advance. It wasn’t the first such suit either. In 2014, a Colorado nursing home worker sued her employer after an off-duty officer hired for a surprise training flashed a gun at her. That same year, an Ohio teacher sued his district for $125,000 after a cop tackled him during a lockdown drill.
“If anyone ever comes to you and wants you to give them a contract for this, get a written letter from your insurance carrier saying they’ll cover [mental health],” Kenneth Trump says. “That’s the best advice I can give.”
Biblio, who comes from law enforcement and now co-owns a security consulting business, compares it to the post-natural disaster economy. “It’s like after Hurricane Katrina hit,” Bilbo says. “Every man with a hammer came here saying they were a contractor. They’d tell people ‘I’ll fix your house. I’ll get you back on your feet.’ A lot of them were legitimate contractors. A lot of them would run off with your money.”
Castillo’s legacy is more than the way he died. A memorial robotics tournament has been organized in his name. He’s received posthumous honors from both police and the Knights of Columbus. A petition to have him honored in the ESPY sports achievement awards has more than 75,000 signatures.
One of the students who followed Castillo’s lead to restrain the shooter was senior Brendan Bialy. “I want to make something very, very clear,” he told the Denver CBS affiliate. “Kendrick Castillo died a legend. He died a trooper. He got his ticket to Valhalla. And I know he will be with me for the rest of my life.”
But it’s possible that lionizing the actions of students like Castillo could be harmful, too. This spring, the National Association of School Psychologists put out a statement warning not to encourage children to fight shooters. “We have some concern, though, about the nature and tone of the extensive coverage of and related social media engagement regarding the students who lost their lives by physically engaging with the shooters,” it stated. “Without question, these young people acted selflessly and helped to save lives. They deserve to be honored and remembered. However, we caution against unintentionally glamourizing the extremely high risk of confronting an armed assailant head-on, particularly when it involves youth.”
Castillo’s father, John Castillo, told NBC News that the one time he talked with his son about the possibility of a shooter, he instructed him to run.
”You don’t have to be the hero,” his father said.
Peter Rugg is a freelance journalist with work appearing in Vice, Rolling Stone, Atlantic, and Thrillist, among others. Follow his intermittent tweets @petermrugg.
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