Dive Brief:

• A "fake" lockdown Thursday at Jewett Middle Academy in Winter Haven, FL, saw unannounced police officers burst into classrooms with drawn, loaded service pistols looking for a fellow officer who was dressed in plainclothes and pretending to be a shooter.  
• Students, teachers, and parents were not informed of the surprise "active shooter drill," resulting in some frightening texts home and a slew of furious parents in the aftermath.  
• Winter Haven Police Chief Charlie Bird, however, thought the drill and its surprise element went very well, telling WTVT, "It's very important that, when you do your drill, you do it without everyone knowing that it's a drill." 

Dive Insight:

While many districts are on high-alert and doing whatever possible to both curb school shootings and make sure their campuses are prepared if one happens, questions are raised regarding when a district is going too far. The scenario in Winter Haven sounds eerily familiar to a spring trend where TV news crews were going into schools to see how easily they could roam campuses without being checked. The investigations were telling about school safety, or the lack thereof, but they also resulted in a school lockdown on at least one occasion. Critics of the TV undercover work found that it did not accurately portray school safety and questioned how these investigative stories served the public interest.

But the bigger question — and the one more connected to this story in Winter Haven — is one of ethics. A parent of a child who was in the school that went on lockdown last spring, during the TV news investigations, told the New York Times that she felt the news station “crossed the line.” Did the Winter Haven police officers cross the line, as well?  

The "active drill" not only scared many students, but also most likely wasted instructional time. There are other ways to proactively push safety in schools. For example, in one Delaware district, staff have been outfitted with bulletproof whiteboards that double as a shield if faced with gunfire.