Hah, some places near me are like that, I live in the largest town in my area, so many of the ones nearby send kids to our high schools or others closeby, and they don’t all have the best time trying to get around, especially with the schools not being off of main roads. Though many of the adults work in or near Philadelphia, and that is a huge pain with traffic, so my dad, doesn’t work that far away but to get to work at 7:30 he’s out by 6.
Though really the reason our school starts earlier was so the school district could rip off the teachers with their contracts requiring them to work the extra hours without extra pay, and so they can get cheaper bus rates. (The change to move everyone but elm up a half hour happened 10-15ish years ago)
Edit: I forgot about before school activities some kids do, that requires a minimum half hour to hour early, but if you get to one of the school early enough you get free coffee!
When I was in high school, I had to be up at 6 AM and at the bus stop by 6:45 in order to catch my bus. It was a 10 minute walk from my house to the bus stop so it wasn’t really that bad so I could leave the house at 6:30 to get there. The only thing I did in the half hour I had before I had to leave was finish the half of my homework that I didn’t do the night before. :lol:
Of course in junior year, I got a car and it was a 15 minute drive to school tops so I could sleep until 7:20 that time. Get a breakfast sandwich and coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts at 7:30 and arrive there at 7:45 and be in home room before the 7:50 bell rings that starts advisory.
My high school had something they called “Blended” classses where the classes were half onlne, half traditional. On “online” days, you wouldn’t need to go to class. So! My friends and I had blended first period, so on late starts we’d go to denny’s and we wouldn’t get to school until 8:30!
Wish my school could have had that. Though I don’t think it would have worked because it was a vocational education school. Part of the school day was dedicated to everyone working in their shops that they chose. I doubt one could do Automotive Technology or Health Careers hands on classes online.
Slow Whoop x3 Then in a female voice “Attention, Attention. An emergency has been reported in this building, please cease operations and leave the building utilizing the nearest exit or fire exit stairway. Do not use elevators. Repeat do not use elevators.”
The panel is an EST3, with 3 annunciators around the building at 2 of the 3 exits/entrances to the parking lots. Pulls at every stairway and exit door, plus one annunciator in the office with a mic, and 1 pull directly below it, all pulls but that one in public areas have Stopper IIs with horns.
Funny story, where I went to elementary school got their system replaced with an identical one, down to the message, even though that school doesn’t have an elevator. For some reason they were unable to figure out how to remove it from the message, even after telling the panel it did not have an elevator.
They also at my school replaced the second dead smoke detector since the panel was installed last year, I wonder what may be causing them to die, and it wasn’t a student as it was an issue on the first day of school before anyone even got to that hallway.
Monday September 11th 2017 - during lunch today the system went into alarm unexpectedly. The thing I found most funny is everyone just kind of looked at the speakers for a second, then everyone stood up and looked at eachother having no idea what to do. Although they never know when we’ll have a drill there was one Friday so it made no sense to happen today. (I helped with the drill Friday so I was really confused) turns out a smoke detector ousidevthe gym, which is across the hall from the cafeteria which means we’d if seen if there was a fire tripped. The only thing I noticed was a funky smell in that area of the hall. The fire department was there in about 5 minutes.
It happened again at my college; there was a false fire alarm caused by someone’s backpack catching onto a pull station. It happened in the Student Union, but I wasn’t in that building when it happened (so no video footage this time.) I first learned of it while I was in the Fine Arts building, and I heard the sound of a SpectrAlert Advance sound in Code-3 briefly. At first I thought it was in the building I was in (as they also have Advances), but then I learned it was over someone’s walkie-talkie. So I left that building to investigate and heard fire truck sirens sounding, and then found it was coming from the Student Union, as people were lined up and waiting outside, and I saw a strobe flashing through one of the windows and could faintly heard the Advances in the renovated areas and the electromechanical horns in the non-renovated areas (a few Faraday U-HN-MCs and Standard 450 horns). When I came up to near the building I asked what had set off the alarm and they told me it was someone’s backpack having caught on a pull station in the cafeteria (it was apparently one of the Faraday F1G Chevrons that’s located right next to some dining tables; just about any time this kind of false alarm happens it’s always a Faraday Chevron that’s accidentally set off.)
Then the director of facilities for the college said that they are going to work on installing Stopper II covers over the pulls in this building so it doesn’t happen again. That doesn’t surprise me; some of the buildings already have Stopper covers over their pull stations, but the Student Union only has one Stopper cover, over an NBG-12LX pull in one of the renovated sections. I know it’ll be easy to install the Stopper covers over the pulls in those renovated areas, but the non-renovated parts of the building have their pulls installed on Space Age Electronics, Inc. - DAR Device / Appliance Relocator those Space Age Electronics ADA-extension adapters. I imagine they will probably just put the Stopper II backboxes around them to install the covers over them, cutting an opening in the top of the backbox to fit the adapter.
One of my younger brothers in high school texted me this morning and said they already had 2 fire drills today. Knowing that school, they’ll probably have a total of 3-4 today. Unless they’ve replaced the system in the past year (fully expect a replacement in the next few years with the upcoming expansion), it’s a massive EST 3 system with the following:
Horns: Mostly Genesis horn/strobes, with Genesis remote strobes in restrooms, Wheelock MIZ and Gentex GX-90 mini horn/strobes in some classrooms on the first floor and EST Integrity horn/strobes in one wing that was built in 2000. Assuming nothing has changed in the 6 years since I was there, Genesises and indoor Integrities do code 3, while the mini horns and outdoor Integrities are continuous. Was a Simplex system with flush-mount mechanical horns of some sort before I got there.
Pulls: EST SIGA-278s (many with GE branding), Stoppers over pulls in the gyms. Until Summer 2009, there were a few Simplex pulls in older parts of the building that were replaced when pulls were replaced with ADA-height ones.
Smokes: EST SIGA detectors in hallways. Science classrooms have EST heat detectors.
Not really a fire drill for me but on my way to school to go to my class, I drove by a building which I didn’t catch the name of but there was outdoor Integrity going off in code-3 with the strobe flashing. I was a bit curious about that but as I was driving and on my way to class, I couldn’t pull over to check it out.
Not in my dorm, but another dorm on my campus has a serious false alarm issue. They have smoke detectors in every single dorm room that do not have sounder bases, so the system goes into full fire every time someone opens a bag of popcorn in their room. We are talking SpectrAlert Advances IN your dorm room. Ow, your ears.
They have had 5 alarms in the past 5 days or so. Most of which happened around midnight or later into the middle of the night. 1 day they had 2 back to back. As soon as they came back in from the building, the system activated again and everyone was evacuated again. I’m currently writing up a plan to send into the college to help reduce false alarms.
Today we had to evacuate out into pouring rain during 4th period due to a false alarm. It turns out that due to renovations/construction, a whole bunch of dust entered the boiler room and set off the smoke detector (Siemens FP-11). It was really fun because I was sitting right under a Wheelock AS, so my ears rang for a few minutes afterward. Anyway, after about 10 minutes, we were allowed to go back inside, but as soon as we did the alarms went off again. After a couple seconds they stopped, and then started again. They did this 4-5 times, so I figure that they were trying to reset the system, but the alarm condition had not cleared from the smoke detector. The NAC’s seemed to be having trouble handling being reset and going right back into alarm though, as some alarms were sporadically going off, there was no sync whatsoever, and other alarms didn’t go off at all.They ended up silencing the system, as it was taking them a long time to get the system to reset, and we were allowed to resume class. I overheard the principal say that we’re having a fire drill tomorrow during 1st period (which sucks because I sit right under a UMMT), because in the state of Ohio, a real alarm doesn’t count for a fire drill.
Kind of reminds me of what happened in 4th grade. I don’t know the specifics but we had a false alarm go off and as soon as we came back in it went off again and then when we got to our classroom only area of the hallway had alarms go off.
Yeah, Ohio doesn’t count real alarms as drills, which have to be scheduled in advance with the fire department. I lived in Ohio for a couple years and one year we had a drill a couple days after a real fire (our yearly FD-supervised drill, no less). New York, on the other hand, lets schools count most alarm activations as drills as long as they are properly documented (a few years, we had an alarm set off by fog machines/construction/pranksters and they came off our required drill total). When I was in 10th Grade, only 10 of our required 12 drills were scheduled.
