Elementary school: Hated them. Didn’t even want to go to school if I knew we were going to have a fire drill.
Middle school: Didn’t like them either, but in my school I went to for 6th grade the alarms were low-pitched mechanical horns, so they weren’t that bad. For 7th and 8th I had to deal with ZNSs which I didn’t like. Plus that school could never figure out how to reset the system properly.
High school: Indifferent. I didn’t care, but at least I got a quick break from class.
College: Most of the classroom buildings don’t hold fire drills during the semester, but it’s a pain in the neck to have to leave my dorm building whenever someone burns lunch.
Elementary/junior high (same school): TrueAlerts but voice evac. It had a message that I’ve never heard anywhere else though. Not awful, got to skip class for 10 minutes.
High school: More TrueAlerts! Different school though, and horn only. There are a few speaker strobed dotted around the building but only in the gym and commons area. Probably one of my favorite sounding horns next to a Spectralert Classic.
They really aren’t that bad as they are startling. In grade school we would know it was coming because pretty much anywhere in the building you could hear a faint beep before the slow whoop came over. I’m pretty sure it was the remote command center going into alarm (there was one in the office and most of my classes were near there when I started paying attention to it). Now, we rarely do a drill (once per year) and in grade school we had one every month.
In general, yes. As @Alexis_T put it, I’m both scared and intrigued at the same time during drills. It also gives me an adrenaline rush for the next several periods after it occurs.
Elementary School: Yep. It was a pretty nice system too - Simplex 2901-2903 horns with TrueAlerts in the 3rd-grade halls and gym. Luckily I didn’t get any in Gym since it was really loud there but it constantly jump scared the class in 3rd grade. It definitely scared me.
Middle School: Yeah… Well, sort of. We only had fire drills twice a year since they thought it would be better if we weren’t accustomed to it happening every month, which does make sense in a way. They started holding more drills last year since they realized that emergency preparedness became an issue in my 7th-grade year. I liked the system since it was an EST Voice Evac.
High School (now): Somewhat. The Wheelock Exceeders are very loud and it’s a pain to have literally stand under one in an echoey hall. I’m not surprised that I’m constantly the first person out of the building since it takes about an average of 11 minutes (considering all the times reported this school year) to get the entire building cleared which does make me a bit disappointed…
We also have to have 1 lockdown drill every semester. I guess the laws in Ontario and Canada are different from The US because my old elementary school had the same protocols (6 fire drills and 2 lockdown drills in an entire year)
From Elementary school to Middle school, I had to deal with -9219s, TrueAlerts, and GX-90s, and I was scared to DEATH. Most of the time I would get someone to get me outside before they even pull the alarm, but at the start of high school I started to get over it, especially the side with the -9846s and TrueAlerts because there are no horns in the classrooms. The other building with Siemens ceiling Z-series devices & horns in the classrooms definitely startles me, but thats really it.
I don’t know but I guess loud noises, even class-change tones destroyed me when I was little. Now I can walk into a school dance when they’re blasting music at over 110dB and have a blast :lol: :lol:
Hmmm…interesting question. Similar to what a few others have said, but during any typical drill, I got startled a bit, but it was exciting to hear/see the system in action.
I hated drills in elementary school and middle school and couldn’t care less in the rest of my schooling. Now, I get annoyed at times having fire drills as it seems like we are always having them this year.
In preschool, I was terrified of them, with the horn/strobe overhead and the out-of-sync strobes. In elementary school, I was less scared of them, partially because the noise was restricted to the hallways. Once I reached second grade, I pretty much stopped caring altogether.
I got into the hobby of fire alarm collecting around the time I went into middle school, and since then, I’ve enjoyed and looked forward to fire drills. I even went to the college on a day I didn’t have classes so I could film the same alarms that two decades ago used to terrify me and made me want to play hookie.
Elementary: Sure. I only remember one day I got surprised. Prior to that, I smelled something like a thermal heater. But it was like when I walked to PE. We got Edwards Integrities on Code 3. I can’t remember if we had Edwards SIGA-278 pulls or BG-10’s or BG-12’s.
Middle: Nah. We had Wheelock NS horn strobes in code 3 IN MOST OF THE CLASSROOMS. I thought it was a teacher sounding a whistle to get our attention, but no! It was the dang fire alarm. In 7th Grade, I had a fire drill before of after a flag burning ceremony. The classroom I was in had only a Wheelock RSS remote syncable strobe. Outside are Wheelock MTWP horn strobes with continuous.
High school: Ahhhhhh. Most of the classrooms have SpectrAlert Advance ceiling mount remote strobes. It then sounds like a horn chime or decaying horn (a horn fading out). When I get close to a PC2W, it sounds like I got my headphones turned up all the way.