So could the middle and high school not have any drills together?
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Most drills were combined with the alarm going off. Elementary/middle/high in one building. Drills were put online for middle/high school students to see and teachers were always informed in advance.
Not the case at any school I went to in New York, elementary, middle, or high. Nobody in NY knew when a drill was happening. The middle/high schools also did 3-4 in a day.
Why didn’t they announce it the last four times?
Why didn’t they announce it the last four times?
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Oh, no, all drills were announced ahead of time. They just did them without the alarm on 4 separate occasions (3 one year, 1 the next).
That is what I meant to ask but I guess it didn’t come out right or I mis-worded it. Why didn’t they use the alarms for those 4 times?
My elementary schools always did two drills the first week of school, one the very first day of school, and one usually towards the end of the week (I believe this is a NC requirement for elementary schools). The first was always announced in a manner such as (actual wording varies): “Teachers, please review your fire drill plans with your class now. The fire drill will take place in ten minutes”. One school did not sound the alarms for this first drill (EST QuickStart with Genesis horn/strobes), but the principal came on the PA and said “This is a Fire Drill. Please evacuate the building. This is a Fire Drill. Please evacuate the building”. As for the second drills, they weren’t announced over the PA, but the teachers usually told us the day of and reviewed the evacuation plans.
The only times any alarm-related announcements in middle school were made was in 7th-8th grade, when the Fire-Lite MS-5210UD portion of the system would alarm for no apparent reason (the system was a Fire-Lite MS-5210UD+Cerberus Pyrotronics SXL-EX–only the MS-5210UD would alarm randomly). The 34Ts would saw through the walls for about ten seconds, shut off, and someone would announce “the fire alarms in the 100, 200, and 300 buildings are acting up again. Please ignore the alarms”. For the record, this system is now controlled by a Siemens FireFinder XLS with zone conversion modules.
As for high school, same story. The Silent Knight IFP-2000 glitched out regularly, which were accompanied by the same kind of announcement (“Please ignore the alarms!”). The worst glitch was an issue with the sync, as the SpectrAlert Advances lost sync within about a minute of the NACs energizing. This system has also been replaced in its entirety by a Siemens FireFinder XLS.
That is what I meant to ask but I guess it didn’t come out right or I mis-worded it. Why didn’t they use the alarms for those 4 times?
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No clue. Not that I’m complaining. Every flipping room had a Commander2 (including restrooms and small offices) and I was often under that thing when it went off.
I’m lucky that only a few rooms I was in actually had alarms that went off.
Of course I will never forget my ears being raped by the 2DCD in the former assessment center/special education classroom/pseudo computer lab that one time.
That has happened at my primary school long ago. A fire drill was scheduled one day and the alarm (4903-9418) did not ring when the time came and a little bit later, the PA came on and the principal said “the fire drill is canceled, the fire drill is cancelled”.
I think a very appropriate situation for announcing a fire drill in advance over the intercom would be if the school had just gotten a new fire alarm system; the principal or secretary or whatever would have to let the students and faculty know that the new fire alarms sound different from the old ones (especially if they’re going from, say, old electromechanical AC horns to a modern voice-evac system) before their first fire drill with the new system to avoid any confusion when the new alarms do go off, because there’s a good chance there would be many returning students, and I doubt they’d replace the entire faculty in the school so quickly either.
I think that some schools do end up doing that so that they can make the next few fire drills a lot more smoother. It would be completely inefficient to not give anybody a warning after the system has been changed out and most students wouldn’t realize that it was in fact a drill. I would say make the announcement for the next few fire drills would be helpful so students can get time to adjust. After that, then they don’t have to bring it up for the future.