Disability rights activist Isabel Mavirdes-Calderón posed a question on her Instagram last September. More than a decade before, a shooter killed 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Since then, the FBI has advised that the best protocol for shootings is to “Run, Hide and Fight.” But what, she asked, “happens to the kids who can’t do those things?”
In the following days, almost 200 students, parents and teachers flooded her comments to give their answers.
“No one stopped to help me or gave me a second glance as they exited,” one student wrote.
“... I dropped out for the rest of the year. I can’t really run so how can I take that risk?” another commented.
“My wife is an elementary special ed teacher. She uses a wheelchair. At her old school, her principal did not have a plan for her or the students in her room. Even worse, they were in a glass windowed room off the main hallway with nowhere to hide.”
“Sometimes I feel like the only answer is to homeschool and isolate my disabled child further.”
“We can’t keep getting left to die”
Across the U.S., there have been 435 school shootings since 14 people were killed at Columbine High School in 1999, according to a Washington Post database, and more than 398,000 students have been exposed to gun violence.
School emergencies — from school shootings to lockdown drills to standard fire evacuations — can be upsetting and chaotic for many students, but especially disruptive for some students with disabilities. More than 7.5 million students, around 15% of all public school students, received special education or related services under the Individuals with Disabilities Act during the 2022-23 school year. In Indiana, over 182,000 students were enrolled in programs for students with disabilities in 2024.
Over the past decade, shootings and policies have increasingly brought school safety plans for students with disabilities into the spotlight. In 2017, parents in Howard County, Maryland, started advocating for new statewide policies after a 14-year-old student, who uses a wheelchair and has limited verbal skills, was left to wait in an upstairs stairwell during emergency evacuation drills. In 2022, a student in Missouri was left without her cane during an active shooting, making it difficult for her to escape the shooting that left two dead.
There are no statewide or federal mandates for how Indiana schools must specifically accommodate these students in their emergency operation plans, which establish protocols for protecting against safety threats. In interviews with reporters from the Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism, representatives from 16 Indiana public school districts detailed a wide, and sometimes inconsistent, range of accommodations in these plans.
Representatives from some districts said the lack of regulation is a good thing, allowing them to make accommodations on a student-by-student basis. Some experts, however, said limited oversight could mean students with disabilities are overlooked when crafting school procedures.
Indiana code generally states schools should develop protocols for armed intruder drills that have “accommodations for students who have mobility restrictions, sensory needs, or auditory or visual limitations” and “alternative exercises for students who are unable to participate in the drill.” The code doesn’t further specify exactly what these accommodations and alternatives should look like.
Virginia adopted a new law this year requiring schools to make individualized emergency safety plans for students with disabilities after students and advocates expressed their concerns with evacuation procedures. Texas also adopted a new law this year that requires school districts to add individualized accommodations for disabled students into emergency operation plans.
Federal regulations offer limited guidance, too. While some federal laws — the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act — protect students with disabilities more broadly, they don’t require specific emergency response accommodations.
Karly Sciortino-Poulter, director of The Arc Advocacy Network in Indiana, said her organization doesn’t hear many complaints from students and their families about accommodations in emergency response plans. She’s only ever had one student, who used a wheelchair and attended a private religious school, reach out with concerns about being able to evacuate their two-story school.
“Public schools are actually very used to this, especially when they’ve got students who have more substantial needs,” she said.
Sciortino-Poulter thinks that decisions on how to accommodate students shouldn’t be up to state lawmakers: it should be a school-by-school and “student-by-student” decision.
“The needs of a student with severe autism who has massive sensory processing issues are going to be radically different from that student with cerebral palsy, who may be affected physically but not cognitively,” she said. “And that may be different for a student who has a mild intellectual disability, but no physical needs at all.”
Lucy Fischman, an associate research scientist with the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community’s Center on Education and Lifelong Learning, wants evidence-based standards that schools are required to follow in their accommodations.
“Is it actually working? Who’s analyzing that?” said Fischman, who previously worked as a teacher and principal. “I think that’s where we could use some state support on that piece if it’s not happening. To my knowledge, I don’t think it is.’”
And while concerns about safety plan accommodations aren’t brought up to her often, Fischman said, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
“Everyone who’s ever worked in a school has a story of a disparity in what happens to a student with a disability when a school day goes wrong,” she said. “Just these things happen, but we can avoid it, and we can avoid the trauma that can result from a drill gone bad.”
How are Indiana public schools accommodating students?
The Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism reached out to over 170 Indiana public school districts to request interviews from February to April this year. Sixteen responded.
For many Indiana public schools, the first step in developing emergency response plans is identifying any students with physical or emotional disabilities.
At Bloomfield School District, school leaders go through class rosters and review these students’ schedules to pinpoint any potential “challenges they may face getting out of the building.” The district, which serves just over 800 students, develops an individual protocol for that student and adds it to the building’s overall evacuation procedures.
Bloomfield Elementary School Principal Jason Bradburn said each classroom is equipped with an “emergency bag” containing a binder with special instructions for that room, including the names of any students who have a disability potentially hindering them from safely exiting the building.
Logansport Community School Corporation’s district-wide safety plan has a section specifically dedicated to helping students with disabilities in case of emergencies. Each school building in the school corporation has a detailed plan: specific staff members are assigned to specific students who have disabilities and need extra assistance.
Some special education staff members wear lanyards with visual cues that they can use to communicate with hearing or nonverbal or hearing-impaired students in an emergency. Some teachers and instructional aids have extra training dedicated to figuring out how to evacuate students with mobility issues, and the district purchased additional equipment — including slides, mobility aids and medication boxes — for emergencies.
Most school districts said each student with a disability had an individualized plan for emergencies, though some provided more detailed examples of what these accommodations look like than others. The Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, which serves more than 16,000 students, generally stated “Each student has an individual plan.”
Doug Goeglein, East Allen County Schools district safety specialist, said his district also takes steps to accommodate students with emotional or cognitive disabilities in their emergency protocols. Some students might not understand the alerts and instructions of what to do during a lockdown, so teachers get creative.
“Maybe we put colorful tape on the floor and we call it, you know, like the ‘timeout zone,’” he said.
Goeglein said teachers try to consider how to create “the safest possible scenario” for their students.
“You want to come up with something that creates the intended action you want… without triggering a disability as best you can,” he said.
But not all Indiana schools detail specific plans for students with emotional or mental disabilities.
Accommodations for students with cognitive disabilities are rarely discussed in safety plans for Fremont Community Schools, a small district serving just around 1,000 students. Fremont Middle School principal Mitchell Ridenour said the district’s plan mainly addresses physical disabilities. This is partially because Fremont is part of a special education co-op with four surrounding Indiana counties, where schools often transport students who have intensive physical or emotional disabilities to a school in nearby Kendallville, Indiana. This school, Ridenour said, has more resources better suited to students’ needs.
“We don’t have the resources to accommodate every single child that’s in our school district,” he said. “So we really have to hone in on the resources that the co-op offers.”
Christine Hess, Logansport Community School Corporation’s safety specialist and a former elementary principal, said that the best people to decide how to design emergency response plans are the people in the schools: teachers, therapists, parents and students.
“Just from my experience, I will tell you that our folks work incredibly hard and safety is (a) critical, number one goal for our school corporation, for our classroom teachers,” Hess said. “And we hit it hard and they just do a phenomenal job, but allowing them to have input too on what will work best for students in those kinds of scenarios is critical and helpful.”
Arnolt Center for Investigative Journalism interns Mia Hilkowitz, Jacob Spudich, Ava Westendorf, Peyton Smith, Brian Gring and Grace Bundy contributed to this reporting.
