Since 1999, there have been more than 430 school shootings across the nation. Oregon alone has had eight incidents since 2008, according to CNN. With school shootings being a concern for parents, teachers and students, a new industry around school safety has emerged. Estimated to be worth $4 billion, school shooting preparedness and security is projected to continue to grow. From panic buttons and bullet-resistant backpacks to drill simulations and AI gun detection software, the amount of products and services being sold to schools and districts varies wildly.
A new HBO documentary, “Thoughts and Prayers,” takes a look at this industry and follows students, teachers and community members during a mass-casualty event drill in Medford, Oregon. Directors Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock join us to share more about the school security industry.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. According to a tally by The Washington Post, there have been more than 430 school shootings across the country since Columbine in 1999. Almost 400,000 students have been exposed to those shootings, meaning they went to one of those schools that year. But millions more American students have done active shooter drills. It’s estimated that the school shooting security industry now takes in about $4 billion every year. That includes everything from panic buttons and bullet-resistant backpacks and robotic dogs to AI gun detection software, live fire training for teachers, and elaborate mass casualty simulation exercises.
The new documentary “Thoughts and Prayers” is a clear-eyed and devastating look at this industry. It features terrified students, overwhelmed teachers, and eager industry representatives, and it has a big focus on the Medford School District. Jessica Dimmock and Zackary Canepari directed the movie, which is streaming now on HBO. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Jessica Dimmock: Hi, thanks for having us.
Zackary Canepari: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: I want to start with a clip from the movie. This is Julie. She’s a middle schooler in Medford talking about her hopes for the future.
Julie: I really want to be a teacher, elementary school teacher. I really like little kids and I like working with them. I like letting them express themselves and teaching them to help them succeed in life. But again, that will be frustrating because of school shootings. I have to do a bunch of trainings for them, get ready, and especially if I’m a teacher and one of the kids gets hurt, I will be very guilty even if it’s not my fault. It would just be like, I could have done this to protect them and I would be like, I’d feel guilty.
Miller: People over the age of maybe 40 may not have a sense for what kinds of exposures that students like Julie, students all over the country, have to shooting drills and other school shooter preparedness. Can you give us a sense first just to the extent of what we’re talking about here?
Dimmock: Julie is this kind of perfect example of your average American student, which is that she’s grown up in a post-Columbine era and she’s also grown up in a post-Newtown and Sandy Hook era, which is that, not only do these things happen, but these things happen so regularly and at such crazy scale, and then again, nothing changes. So the feeling that she has, I think what’s devastating about her clip, is not only that it’s frustrating for her, it’s that she’s already internalized this sense of guilt because she would in this case be the one that’s responsible for stopping a school shooting as opposed to understanding that this is something that adults should have solved long ago.
Miller: And Zackary, embedded in that, and Jessica’s getting to this, but there’s a sense even when she’s imagining her future, say 20 years from now, she’s assuming that school shootings will still be woven into the fabric of her experience, that 20 years forward, things won’t have gotten better, and she’s imagining the guilt of not being able to to save her future students, people who haven’t even been born yet. One of the things you did in this movie is really center on the experiences of kids. They’re adults, but kids probably spend the most time talking. What kinds of other themes emerged in the many kids that you talked to?
Canepari: In the case of Julie, which I think is so absolutely accurate, why would she expect sort of anything else? It is 100% her entire life has been in a world, in a country in which mass shootings are the norm, and there’s no sense or feeling that that’s going to change anytime soon. Even as myself, as a 45 year old, I feel the same way. I don’t think we’re any closer to meaningful gun reform, despite the efforts and despite the crazy traumatic events that continue to happen over and over again. One thing that Jess and I really tried to do was hear the kids out. Let’s see what it looks like to be them. Let’s hear what they have to say about living in this time.
I think the thing that really stood out to us was that while we did interview and work with a lot of adults, it was really the kids had the most clear-eyed perspective on what it was like to grow up and live in these times. They were the ones that had the answers that seemed so obvious, or seem so relevant, and it was the kids that point out that guns are the number one killer of kids in America. It’s the kids that point out that this only happens in America. It’s the kids that point out that there’s more guns in America than any other country on earth. So it wasn’t the adults that are looking through these lenses, it was the kids. I think for us it was just so clear that these were the ones who are the most affected and in ways that we can’t even really understand at this stage.
Miller: You spent a lot of time with a Medford high schooler named Summer. This is before she and a bunch of people in the community were going to take part in a really large scale shooting drill. She was pretty apprehensive about it. This is part of where she is talking about what she’s feeling:
Summer: I always thought about the mass shooting in Las Vegas, of that older guy at that country festival. I always think about that. I mean, I will be nervous. I’m gonna think it’s real, but it’s fake and I know it’s fake and I know that there’s a good outcome, there’s gonna be a good outcome.
Miller: It does sound like she’s trying to convince herself of that as opposed to being sure.
Dimmock: Yeah.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for what this drill, which happened to be in Medford, but they happen all over the country all the time, what the one in Medford actually looked like, what it entailed?
Dimmock: A mass casualty event or exercise like the one we filmed in Medford, like you just said, these happen all over the country. They happen all the time. They’re not particularly rare. It is when a school district, a municipality, a township decides to kind of stage a large scale fake mass casualty event, filled with either students or other civilians pretending to be victims, sometimes with fake blood, with fake bullet wounds, with mock shooters, and it’s an opportunity for the township or the municipality or whoever is kind of putting this drill on to kind of practice what they would do.
Everything from the time that the shooting starts all the way to notifying parents, moving bodies, coordinating with hospitals, coordinating with law enforcement. It’s all the way in our film to the press conference that will eventually need to happen to announce to the community how many people have died. We do this, this is a kind of American ritual, where we kind of practice for the real thing, over and over again.
Miller: You mentioned the press conference. I want to play a clip from one of the press conferences there. So the superintendent of the Medford School District at the time was Bret Champion. And at the end of the simulation, he gives first a fake press conference still as part of this, the simulation to say this is what happened. Then right after that, they get rid of a thing saying a fake press press conference and they have the real one where the superintendent talks about the exercise itself. This is what he had to say in that second real press conference:
Bret Champion: I started an earlier press conference saying, as if this was a real event, that it was a heartbreaking day in the Medford School District and playing that role, that was true. But I’ll tell you, as I stand here today, I think right now it’s also a heartbreaking day for all of us who have students in public schools, that this is something that is necessary, that we need to do. That said, we need to do it. The reality is this is where we are in this country, where we are right now in this valley.
I make no apologies for the event that we just did together. What I reminded the crew today is that what we are doing here in the Medford School District is building muscle memory and thinking through and trying to ensure that we minimize the loss of life in the event of such a thing happening here. I’m so pleased that we were able to do that today, but I do not want to lose the fact that it is still a sad thing that we have to do this.
Miller: So here is the superintendent of this school district, but somebody who’s made the decision that probably hundreds of thousands of other leaders of districts have said, that they should do one of these events. He’s saying that it’s sad, but we have to do this because this will help save lives. To me, this is a question that hovers throughout the whole movie. If he’s right, the industry representatives, they have a serious financial incentive in selling their various products, and simulations are a product. School administrators, they seem to be sincerely and passionately focused on doing something to make their students and staff safer. Do you think these drills do that?
Canepari: I think that’s a really important question, absolutely. I think it’s more just that none of these things are actual prevention. Maybe they have an impact on if a shooting does happen, maybe the casualty number or the victim number comes down a little bit, but it’s still happening. The gunman has come to the school. All of the things in our films, stimulation products, technology, all that stuff, is assuming that the gunman is coming, and that he’s already entered the building for the most part or is outside the building. While the impact is sort of unquantifiable because a lot of the time we don’t really have a way to measure how impactful this stuff actually is, what we do know is that it’s not going to stop shootings from happening at all.
I think that that’s really kind of like what the film is trying to do, it’s really not trying to completely criticize the industry and the municipalities, districts that are participating in these trainings, because while it is a shame, he’s absolutely right, this is the country that we live in, this problem exists and it’s not going anywhere, therefore we should be prepared on some level. But all that said and done, the film is asking if this is the right solution, basically.
Miller: Jessica, what did you come to understand about the impact that these drills have on students like Summer and Julie and millions of other American kids?
Dimmock: When we say millions, just to be clear, there are lots of students that will never go through a mass casualty exercise like Summer does. While those aren’t particularly rare, they don’t necessarily always involve students, but 95% of American children go through some level or some form of an active shooter drill. So we have an entire generation of kids that from the time they’re in kindergarten or pre-K, all the way through graduating high school, and then probably in college they’ll do it as well, where like several times a year, they stop their usual lessons, they pause and they practice for mass death, and then they go back to their lessons.
When you think about what the cumulative effect of that and what it says about our total failure to actually keep any of these students safe, that they have to practice for people coming in and shooting them, it becomes so clear that something has to change. We can’t live like this. And what we would see with the students that we would interview is that the level of anxiety, the level of feeling that this is not an “if” but a “when,” that they assume that at some point this may happen to them, is also just such a failure.
Miller: I didn’t see footage of any mental health professionals on hand to help students or staff or teachers process what they’re seeing. But we do see the wound makeup preparation. We see images of kids with these fake wounds screaming for help for their parents as they’re lying on a football field. Is it built into these mass casualty event simulations to actually help people who could really be struggling after they take part in them?
Dimmock: There’s some, there is definitely some support. In the Long Island one, the person who ran the drill referred to it as like a Frasier-type person, meaning the therapist that was going to be on site. There’s some support.
Miller: But I got to say that, from some of the images you showed, maybe they’re just so used to putting these, they didn’t seem particularly sensitive to what they were putting on. Maybe that’s a polite way to put it.
Dimmock: There’s very little, these are not run by people who have a background in trauma or early childhood development when it comes to trauma. A lot of the programs and drills that we see, they are trying to do best by their students, but I would say it’s not a trauma informed practice.
Miller: I want to play another excerpt. This is from a TikTok video that a pre-K teacher in Texas posted. She is talking to her kids to get them to… this is after the Uvalde shooting and she is describing how to stay safe.
Pre-K Teacher: Everybody have your listening ears turned on? Good job and everybody catch a bubble, go. Great. Oh, stay on your bottom, please, OK? So we’re gonna start doing this thing. And it is to protect us, OK, so we all stay safe. So we’re going to have a code word. You know what that means? OK. OK. I’m going to explain. A code word is going to be like our safe word. Or phrase, like a sentence. Whenever I say it, you have to be paying attention, babe, OK? Whenever I say it, there’s gonna be a spot in the classroom that we go hide in, OK? We’re not gonna use it often, but whenever we do, you have to know it’s important, OK, so that we all go home safe.
Miller: Again, there she is talking to pre-K kids. It’s notable that she doesn’t talk about shootings per se or a shooter. It’s about generic safety. How much does messaging about all of this work? How much does it vary by age?
Dimmock: I think a fair amount. We have a daughter who’s 8. I don’t think she knows what her drills are for yet, but at some point she is going to know, and I’m always curious.
Miller: Does she know about the movie that the two of you made?
Canepari: She knows that we made a film for HBO and she said, “You guys know HBO?” So not totally.
Miller: If you don’t mind, I’m just curious how you talk to her about this. How you think maybe about talking to her about this.
Dimmock: So hard.
Canepari: Really good question. To be honest with you, we haven’t talked about it with her beyond what the school has sort of offered, which is really treating it more like an emergency drill and not like a gunman or an active shooter event. We’ve kind of left it at that as well. As she gets older, I don’t think that there’s any way to avoid it. It’s going to come up, and it’s just something that we’re gonna have to be careful with, but it’s a reality that I think every parent in America just needs to accept that this is part of growing up in America.
Dimmock: I think what we have found, what has been interesting in the process of making this film is that I don’t think what we’re saying right now is a news flash to any of your listeners. It’s just about distilling it down and breaking it down, that at some point, my 8-year-old or your listeners’ 8-year-olds who don’t know about this, at some point they’re going to know that a thing that can happen is that one of their friends or someone in their community can come into their school and shoot them all up. That’s an insane thing for young people to have to be faced with. We are so at a loss for what to do that we’re kind of going through our lives and we don’t know what else to do, but I think one of the aims of the film is to slow that down and be like, wait, what? And is this a sign of a healthy society? And is this really the best we can do?
Miller: There’s almost no explicit politics in the movie. Early on, there’s a montage of some members of Congress from both sides of the aisle talking, and that’s almost about it. There’s one other adult later on who you ask off camera how much he thinks this is about the prevalence of guns in the U.S., and we hear him talk for 15 seconds or so, but that’s about it. How did you think about navigating the very entrenched politics of American gun culture, gun discussions, as you were crafting this movie?
Canepari: I think we basically didn’t need to talk about it because it’s so understood in America that this problem is in, the gun conversation is in gridlock. There’s very much like a post-Columbine generation, but a lot of what this film is a result of is the post-Sandy Hook generation or post-Sandy Hook time period. And after Sandy Hook happened, it became very clear that we were not as a country willing to change the gun laws in a meaningful way.
I think that once Sandy Hook, once Uvalde, all these events have happened, we’ve come to this point where I think we all know where the politicians are at. We didn’t really wanna rehash that stuff. There’s been other films and other projects and plenty of journalism that has covered that. We kept it as simple and as straightforward as possible because what we wanted to document was what we are doing in this country in a world in which gun violence is the norm and gun and meaningful gun legislation is a far off prophecy. That was really how we treated it.
Then with the conversation around guns with our characters, what was so interesting was with the adults, who a lot of have police and military backgrounds, they were the ones that were implementing the training programs and creating the products. They wouldn’t have brought guns up if we didn’t ask them in a lot of the cases because I think for them it was just an acceptance that the situation was as it is and the products and the trainings that they were teaching and selling were a result of where we’re at. They weren’t in the business of talking about guns or gun reform or gun legislation, and maybe in a lot of ways it was just a way for them to not change those laws because I think a lot of them, a lot of the people in this space, aren’t totally bothered by gun reform.
Miller: Jessica and Zack, thanks very much.
Dimmock: Thank you.
Canepari: Great talk. Thank you.
Miller: Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock are the co-directors of the new HBO documentary “Thoughts and Prayers.”
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