Why Kids Hide Under Desks Instead of Running Out Windows During School Shooter Drills: A Teacher Explains
The all-clear buzzer just blared through the hallway after our monthly active shooter drill, and I was turning the lock on my classroom door when Javi’s hand shot up. He was leaning against his desk, one scuffed white sneaker propped on the leg, a crumpled pack of Goldfish crackers sticking out of his hoodie pocket. He’d asked three off-the-wall questions during math that morning, so I braced for something about dinosaur extinction or why we can’t chew gum in class.
“Ms. Henderson, why do we have to hide under the desk anyway?” he said. “My desk is right by the window, and it opens. If I ran out, the shooter would see me and follow, right? Then everyone else here could get away. Why don’t we do that?”
The room went quiet, and half a dozen heads nodded. Mia, who sits two desks over, said “That makes sense. I can climb a tree faster than most boys, I could outrun anyone.” Leo added that his older brother does parkour, he could jump out a second floor window no problem.
I leaned against the whiteboard, my chipped teacher coffee mug warm in my hand, and thought about the first year I taught here. I’d asked the same question at my first safety training, actually. I was 22, fresh out of college, and it felt wrong to huddle kids in a dark locked room when there was an exit right there. It took a few trainings and a lot of conversations with safety officers to understand why the default is what it is.
I sat down on the edge of our reading rug, and the kids drifted over to sit cross-legged on the carpet. I started with the thing Javi already knew, actually—remember two weeks ago, when you brought your hamster for show and tell and tried to open the window to let him get fresh air? He nodded, grinning. You couldn’t get it open more than four inches, right? Most school windows are built that way now, to stop kids from falling out by accident. Even on the first floor, you can’t fit your whole body through that crack fast. If you break the glass to get out, you’re going to cut yourself bad before you even get outside. On the second or third floor, jumping is almost guaranteed to break a leg or worse, which leaves you trapped and hurt for anyone who finds you.
Then there’s the part no one talks about much: we almost never know where the shooter is when the alarm goes off. If you climb out the window facing the playground, but the shooter is already on the playground, you just ran right into them. When we hide, we lock the door, block it with heavy furniture, turn off the lights, and stay quiet. That gives law enforcement time to get there and contain the threat. Running works when you’re 100% sure the path is clear—if the shooter is on the other end of the school and the front door is 20 feet away, you run. But climbing out a random window is almost always a gamble.
I got to Javi’s other point, the part about drawing the shooter away so everyone else can escape. It’s such a good, brave thought, I told him. It makes total sense that if you can get away, you’d want the shooter to follow you so your friends are safe. But the problem is, we can’t teach kids to do that because it’s an extremely high-risk move that only works in one in a hundred situations. Kids your age don’t have the life experience to judge when that’s the right call, and honestly, most adults don’t either. When you run out into an open area, you’re exposed, easy to target. The whole point of school safety rules is to give the maximum number of kids the best chance to survive, not ask any kid to put themselves in that kind of danger to save others. That’s our job as adults, not yours.
After class that day, I wrote Javi’s question down in my notebook and brought it to the principal’s meeting the next day. A lot of us had been talking for a while about updating our individual classroom plans, not just following the one-size-fits-all district rule. We have six first-floor classrooms with full-size windows that open all the way—those can be marked as secondary exits for teachers who want that option, as long as everyone knows to only use them if the path outside is clear. The district already has an update coming next semester that’s going to encourage exactly that, so it worked out faster than I expected.
For parents who get this same question from their kid, it’s pretty simple. First, don’t brush it off as a silly or inappropriate question. It’s not. Your kid is thinking critically about a scary thing, and they’re coming up with an idea to keep people safe—start by validating that. Say “That’s such a smart, brave question, I’m glad you asked” before you explain anything. Second, next time you’re at parent-teacher conferences, take 30 seconds to look at your kid’s classroom. Check the exits, ask the teacher what the plan is for that specific room, if there are any alternate escape routes that work for that space. Third, you can practice low-stakes safety thinking anywhere you go with your kid—at the grocery store, at the movie theater, ask them “What’s the first exit you’d use if we needed to leave fast? What would you do if that exit was blocked?” It doesn’t have to be scary, just a quick question that gets them thinking through options before anything ever happens.
I still think about Javi’s question every time we do a drill. School safety is full of checkboxes and required training that doesn’t always fit every classroom. Kids ask the questions we’ve stopped asking, because they haven’t gotten used to doing things just because that’s how they’ve always been done. We’re making small changes, one classroom at a time, but there’s still a lot that isn’t perfect. All we can do is listen, adjust, and keep working to give every kid the best chance we can.
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