New fire alarm message at my high school

Currently, both of the high schools in my area (including mine) have been using EST voice evac systems for quite some time. During this time, they have both had a custom message saying something along the lines of “Attention! Attention! The fire alarm has been activated. You need to leave immediately. Exit the school, and gather on the football field, by your class. Attendance will be taken immediately once all persons exit the school. If you are in the commons, please locate your access period teacher for attendance.”. This message works great to direct everyone towards the football field, where we all meet during a fire, however they have decided that the fire alarm could pose a danger to us, because we have been getting a lot of threats along the lines of “we are going to pull the fire alarm, and do something to students and staff.” (trying to keep it appropriate). Because of all of these threats, they have decided to work with the local AHJ (our fire department) and the local police department to create a new fire alarm response plan and message. They sent out an email at the beginning of this week, stating that the work will be done over thanksgiving break. I will not be sharing this email for confidentiality of my location, however they did include the script so that students know what to listen for. The new script is “Attention! Attention! The fire alarm has been activated. If you are currently located in a classroom, bring students inside, and lock the doors. If you are located in the commons, quickly proceed to the nearest classroom. and follow lockdown procedures. The alarm is being verified. Do not exit the building until it has been verified. Await further instructions, and follow lockdown procedures.”. While I do think that this could be good for some schools, I personally think that mine is overreacting, and our top priority should still be evacuation in the case of a fire alarm. This will definitely just end up scaring people, and not being as effective. I predict that it will be switched back as soon as the start of next year. They also want to put this in place, because of the amount of false alarms that happen in my school. We have at least two per month, because of people pulling it, or smoke detectors in the pool room activating. They believe that this will eliminate unnecessary evacuation, however I feel like they could have definitely done a better job at this message, because it is just going to confuse people.

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They could have done a better job, but at least it’s better than having a message telling everyone to leave when they shouldn’t. Hopefully the system will start playing a different evac message once the alarm has been verified, though. That would be a real problem if it didn’t do that.

I think delayed evacuation is a good practice, but it needs to be implemented properly and should not be used in buildings that do not have fire sprinklers.

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They should probably do that message upon activation of a pull. But smokes shouldnt trigger this message. Detectors and water flow should activate the old message. Id reccomend saying this to your district

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They also want this message to eliminate unneeded evacuations of the school, as this is a very large school, and we often have false alarms because of the pool room (I don’t know whose idea it was to put detectors on there). It often gets steamy, and sets them off.

That would defeat the purpose of this new message as it’s trivially easy for someone with malicious intent to trigger a smoke detector or flip the inspector’s test valve. (or, in a shooting, the smoke from the gunfire can trigger the alarm without human involvement.)

@aerhardt It would certainly be possible to program the system to automatically play an evacuation message if the alarm isn’t silenced within a few minutes.

@NOTIFIER Are you in Tennessee by any chance? If so, the message is likely the result of this recently-passed law, which was enacted after what happened at the Covenant School in Nashville: https://publications.tnsosfiles.com/acts/113/pub/pc0563.pdf

Yeah if you ask me STI Stopper IIs & better positioning &/or maintenance of smoke detectors (or even just outright replacing the latter with other kinds like heat detectors or beam detectors) would have been a better solution.

I don’t mean to be rude but would you mind making use of the “ENTER” key? Doing so makes things like this much easier to read & on the eyes.

There’s two separate issues being discussed here, with two different problems.

  1. Ordinary false alarms
    These can be dealt with in many ways, including a zero-tolerance policy, as well as break-glass covers. (which I think are a better deterrent than regular Stoppers)
    Also, harsh environments like the pool room probably shouldn’t have regular smoke detectors.

  2. Acts of violence
    While the main focus in regards to this should be focusing on preventing the violence in the first place, I can understand why a school may want to consider investigating alarms prior to evacuation.
    However, this needs to be done with extreme care: no one wants a well-intentioned solution to one problem to accidentally exacerbate another problem.
    While I strongly support allowing designated staff to investigate and resolve a false alarm in any building, delayed evacuation is a much bigger (and riskier) ask.
    In my opinion, delayed evacuation should only be used after careful consideration of other fire protection features such as compartmentalization of the building, as well as making sure sufficient staffing and procedures are in place to ensure prompt investigation of any alarm.
    Of course, the elephant in the room is preventing the violence in the first place… there’s a reason why schools in other countries don’t have to worry about fire alarm activations being potentially caused by an act of violence. (and talking about that opens a huge political can of worms. I certainly don’t want to introduce politics into this forum, but if you’d like to talk more I can gladly discuss over PM.)
    Another thing to consider is ensuring there’s a microphone in a constantly-attended location, so that the alarm message can be overridden if necessary. (Most, if not all, voice-evacuation systems on the market today will allow at least one remote microphone.)
    Also, going into full lockdown in response to any fire alarm is counterintuitive and confusing (and adds needless stress), and it would of course be the wrong response to an actual fire… telling people to just stand by for further instructions would make more sense.
    Something like this would be a good message for such a use-case: “May I have your attention please. The alarm you are hearing is being investigated. Please listen for additional information which will be provided as soon as possible. Thank you.”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii4YBQqUMcw

The full procedure during an alarm as detailed on the email we received is:

  1. The fire alarm is activated
  2. All students follow lockdown procedures, and proceed to the nearest classroom. While this is happening, a security officer will investigate the source of the fire alarm.
  3. If the alarm has been verified as true, the security officer will make an announcement with information on where the fire is, and how to evacuate. If the alarm is false, the security officer will make an announcement informing everyone to return to normal activities.
  4. If the alarm is false, and there is a threat inside the school, the BluePoint alarm will be activated, and full lockdown will start.

I assume the “announcements” mentioned will be from the many remote microphones that are on our system. There are multiple annunciators across the school, by every major exit, the main office, and the security office. All have the standard EST3 annunciator and a remote mic.

Does this also apply to people in large communal spaces (gym, auditorium, cafe, etc.)?
In some schools the large communal spaces aren’t that close to any classrooms. Is that the case at your school?

Yes, all students need to follow lockdown, even in large spaces like the commons, or a gym. The gym can lock, and the commons is close to many classrooms, so all students need to hide.