Connecticut Sets New Rules for School Crisis Drills

Abbey Clements survived a school shooting. She was a first-grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14, 2012. So when she expresses skepticism about crisis drills, it carries weight.

Clements, who co-founded the national advocacy organization Teachers Unify to End Gun Violence, has two core concerns about the drills schools conduct to prepare for active shooter scenarios. The first is practical: there’s no solid evidence the drills actually keep children safer. The second is psychological: growing research suggests the drills may be causing measurable harm to students’ mental health. If the physical safety benefit is uncertain, the potential mental health cost becomes harder to justify.

“There really is no clear recommendation, no clear protocol, that school districts across the country are following,” Clements said.

That gap is precisely what Connecticut’s recently passed Senate Bill 298 begins to address. The new law establishes statewide standards for how school districts design and conduct crisis drills, replacing a system where each district was largely left to figure it out on its own. Under previous state law, explicit guidelines were minimal. Districts made their own calls, and the results varied widely.

The new standards require early notification for parents before drills take place, mandate age-appropriate instruction, and include an explicit requirement that drills be “trauma-informed.” That last provision reflects a shift in how researchers and policymakers are thinking about school safety. Keeping children physically secure and protecting their psychological well-being are not always the same goal, and the two have sometimes pulled in opposite directions.

A 2025 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine examined the evidence on crisis drills and found that while data remains “mixed and limited,” there is enough to raise “concerns that these drills may be associated with negative mental, emotional, and behavioral health outcomes.” The report argues that in the rush to harden schools against physical threats, districts have too often neglected the inner lives of the students sitting in those classrooms.

Patrice McCarthy, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education, said she doesn’t believe trauma-inducing drills were a widespread problem in Connecticut specifically. But she welcomed the legislation anyway.

“We don’t want to traumatize students who may have experienced trauma in other parts of their lives as well,” McCarthy said.

The national picture is messier. After the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, schools across the country scrambled to improve security. Lockdown drills became standard practice, but standardization of how those drills were conducted never followed. Trent Harrison, president of the Newtown Federation of Teachers, described the inconsistency firsthand.

“One state, they will do a lockdown and they have kids barricading the door with chairs. One, they make them all huddle in the corner,” Harrison said.

The National Academies report confirmed that finding at a systemic level, noting that definitions of what it means for a school to be “safe” still vary widely among educators, researchers, policymakers, and the public. That lack of consensus has meant children in different zip codes experience wildly different versions of crisis preparation, with no shared framework for measuring whether any of it works.

Connecticut’s new law won’t resolve the national debate, but it puts the state ahead of most others in at least asking the right questions. Requiring drills to be trauma-informed is not a minor procedural tweak. It signals that the state recognizes psychological safety as part of school safety, not a secondary concern.

For Clements, who has spent years working to change how the country thinks about gun violence prevention, the legislation represents meaningful progress. She remains clear-eyed about the limits of what drills can accomplish. But bringing some order and sensitivity to a chaotic, inconsistent system is a start.

Connecticut has 166 school districts. Until now, each one was effectively writing its own policy. That changes with this law. Whether the rest of the country follows is a question legislators and advocates in other states will have to answer for themselves.