How Common Are School Lockdowns? One in Five Pupils by Middle School

Ask a class of American thirteen-year-olds who has lived through a real lockdown — not a drill, a real one — and hands go up. A study published online in October 2026 in Educational Researcher, the flagship journal of the American Educational Research Association, set out to answer how common are school lockdowns, and its headline finding is stark: about one in five children had experienced a lockdown in response to a threat of violence by middle school.

Information verified through 1 November 2026.

How common are school lockdowns, in the study’s own numbers

The breakdown matters more than the headline. About 8 per cent of children reported a lockdown in the past year, just over 12 per cent reported one earlier than that, and nearly 80 per cent reported never having been through one. The study defines a lockdown narrowly: firearms activity or other violence at or near the school that prompts staff to seal entrances and exits and restrict movement around the building. A credible threat inside or near the school starts it. Doors lock, rooms go dark, children keep silent.

The data come from just over 10,000 participants, mostly aged 12 or 13, in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a long-running project on children’s brain development supported by the National Institutes of Health. The authors are candid about the limits: the sample is not as nationally representative as a random survey would be, and rural areas are underrepresented. Treat the one-in-five figure as a strong signal from a large cohort, not a census.

Two exclusions shape what the number means. The study asked only about lockdowns, not “lockouts,” where a threat outside leads schools to secure the perimeter while lessons continue behind locked doors. And it did not cover drills at all. Drills — from a teacher talking through the steps to full simulations with role-played confrontations — are a separate subject with their own research, including a National Academy of Sciences report that found some drill practices were causing mental, emotional and behavioural health harms.

School lockdown exposure is not shared equally

The study’s second finding is about who carries this. Past-year school lockdown exposure was more common among children living in census tracts with lower levels of historical and contemporary opportunity, and in school districts with lower socioeconomic status. Children in higher-income districts were less likely to go through one.

Lead author Keith L. Hullenaar, of the University of Washington, puts it plainly in the Education Week report: students who live and learn in places with already low socioeconomic investment are experiencing these events even more than others. The study itself links the pattern to easy access to firearms in the United States and to the higher risk of firearm violence faced by young people from historically marginalised groups in areas that have suffered decades of resource disinvestment.

An outside voice agrees on the significance. Sonali Rajan of Teachers College, Columbia University, who researches firearm violence in schools, called the study an important contribution and said its findings reinforce that schools do not exist in isolation from the communities around them. Her point cuts at a habit in school safety debates: expecting a building to solve, with locks and procedures, a problem that arrives from the streets around it.

What a lockdown does afterwards

This research team has form on the follow-up question. In an earlier study of the same cohort, published in the Journal of School Health, Hullenaar and colleagues found that 20.3 per cent of children reported ever experiencing a school lockdown, and that past-year exposure was associated with increased symptoms of anxiety, somatic problems and stress. Children who already had symptoms in clinical ranges for ADHD or stress problems had higher odds of reporting that a lockdown affected them a lot.

That earlier paper also frames why real lockdowns deserve separate study from drills: a lockdown can be understood as a traumatic event, because students suddenly lose their sense of safety, predictability and normalcy in the place where they learn. Hullenaar makes the educational cost explicit in the new report, too — lockdowns take away instructional time, on top of everything else they take.

His practical recommendation for administrators is unglamorous and doable: after a lockdown, schools need a way to identify the pupils who had the most intense experience of it, and connect them with the social and emotional support they may need to recover.

Tracking school lockdowns in schools: the missing count

Perhaps the strangest part of the story is that a country can argue about lockdowns for years without counting them properly. There is no standard national tally of real lockdown events in the study’s account. The authors call for a standardised system for tracking lockdowns, such as adding questions to federal surveys like the School Survey on Crime and Safety or the Civil Rights Data Collection.

Hullenaar’s frustration is quoted directly: he does not know why lockdowns are not tracked, given how many people are concerned about them, and asks whether it would not be useful to know how many schools in the United States had a lockdown related to a violent event in the past year.

Analysis: Counting would not prevent a single lockdown. It would do something more basic — turn an argument conducted in anecdotes into one conducted in numbers, district by district, so that the unequal pattern this study found could be checked every year instead of rediscovered every few. Until that count exists, one in five is the best figure available, and it comes with the authors’ own warning label attached: a large, careful sample, not a national register. The gap between those two things is, in its own way, the finding.

Photo: Lemonmilk2, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0)

Sources

1. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-lockdowns-are-common-but-in-some-kinds-of-schools-more-than-others/2026/10
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11750594/
3. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/01-02/active-shooter-drills-safety