It's every student's greatest fear. One minute you're sitting in class, mulling over the day's lesson or cramming for a test you desperately need to pass, and the next moment alarm bells are firing and you've been ushered into cover.

Palms begin to sweat. Is this really it? Or is it just another drill?

For students at the Jewett Middle Academy in Winter Haven, Florida, "just another drill" turned into a terrifying ordeal with guns drawn into classrooms.

School officials are calling it an "active shooter drill," meaning officers respond as if there actually were a threat by bursting into classrooms and drawing their weapons in plain view of frightened students and staff.

The main problem? They didn't confirm to students it was a drill until after it was over.

One seventh-grader, Lauren Marionneaux, was so anxious she began texting her mother.

"A lot of people started getting scared because we thought it was a real drill," Lauren told WTVT. "We actually thought that someone was going to come in there and kill us."

School officials and police are fully supporting the fear-inducing drill, reinforcing that this type of training is necessary to assess how a school would respond during a real crisis situation.

"It's very important that, when you do your drill, you do it without everyone knowing that it's a drill. How you train and how you prepare is how you're going to react when everything goes bad, " Winter Haven Police Chief Charlie Bird said. "It really is to protect the children and at no point in time would we endanger any of the children."

Friday morning (November 14) Winter Haven police noted they re-evaluated the procedure and negotiated a way to lessen the impact on students.

"Further lock-down drills that occur at schools within the city limits of Winter Haven will be performed by uniformed officers without weapons," the department said in a press release.