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I’ve come to understand that we use the word “temporary” as a promise. It’s meant to signal that something is wrong, that adults recognize it as wrong, and that the disruption will end because a real solution is being built. Temporary measures are supposed to buy time, not redefine what normal looks like. Even when no end date is announced, the promise is still there: this will not last forever.
That was the premise under which lockdown drills were introduced. They were framed as emergency responses to an unacceptable threat, measures no one wanted children to grow up with, but ones students were told we needed for now.
The problem is that “temporary” only means something if someone actually intends to end it.
We’ve seen what that intention looks like. During the COVID pandemic, adults made decisions that dramatically reshaped children’s lives. Schools closed. Masks became mandatory. Sports seasons disappeared. Milestones were missed. Families argued over tradeoffs, and students struggled under the weight of isolation and disruption. None of it was simple or universally agreed upon. But one thing was clear: this was not accepted as normal. Even amid disagreement, there was a shared understanding that childhood could not be organized around an ongoing emergency.
Eventually, those measures ended. Not because everything was fixed, but because adults decided that children could not keep living in crisis mode.
Lockdown drills never received that same choice.
From the start, there was no sunset clause. There was no national conversation about whether rehearsing for mass violence should be a defining feature of school life. What began as emergency logic slowly hardened into routine. Crisis became infrastructure, not through public debate or collective consent, but through repetition. A response introduced as temporary became permanent.
Lockdown drills do more than prepare students for danger. They teach children how to understand their place when something is wrong. The instructions are clear and strict: stay still, stay silent, wait. Over time, that lesson sinks in. When danger appears, your role is not to question the conditions that created it. Your role is to comply correctly. To endure.
This isn’t abstract to me.
I was in seventh grade, sitting in my classroom at A.D. Henderson in Florida, when the school went into lockdown. At first, everyone assumed it was a drill. That changed when the active shooter alert came through.
What followed wasn’t planned. It was instinct. We grabbed scissors as potential self-defense and we pushed desks against the door. A room full of children did what we believed was necessary to survive.
The lockdown lasted four hours. When it ended, I remember hoping that no other seventh grader would ever need to develop that instinct just to survive an active shooter. I hoped that whatever had failed that day would be fixed before it failed someone else.
Fifteen years later, that hope still hasn’t been met.
Children are still practicing the same drills. They are still learning how to disappear into corners, still being taught that safety requires silence, stillness, and obedience. They are still growing up inside an unresolved emergency. Time has moved forward, but the conditions have not. A measure introduced as temporary has now lasted the length of entire childhoods.
When an emergency never ends, it stops feeling like an emergency at all. It becomes the background of daily life. Children learn this not through explanation, but through repetition. Each drill reinforces the idea that this is something they are meant to live with, not something adults are expected to fix. Over time, responsibility shifts. Instead of asking why the danger persists, students are trained to respond correctly when it appears. The expectation is not that the system will change, but that they will adapt.
March For Our Lives exists because young people rejected the idea that our role was to endure danger indefinitely. The movement was born from a refusal to accept survival as the ceiling of what safety could mean. That work is not about managing violence more efficiently. It is about preventing it. It is about restoring agency to a generation that has been trained, quite literally, to stay still and wait.
But this question extends beyond any one organization. A measure that lasts an entire childhood is no longer temporary. It is a decision. Either we end the conditions that make lockdown drills necessary, or we admit that we have accepted them as permanent. There is no neutral ground between those two choices.
If we believe children deserve more than practice surviving violence, then we have to demand more than repetition. We have to insist on policies that reduce the likelihood of violence in the first place. We have to hold lawmakers accountable for treating mass shooting prevention as optional. And we have to stop asking children to absorb the consequences of adult inaction.
“Temporary” was never meant to last this long. Ending it requires a choice. The only remaining question is whether we are willing to make it.
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