pull station and smoke/heat detector inspection at schools.

Did your schools have this? The schools in my area did this. Each year at the schools, the pull stations, smoke detectors and heat detectors would be inspected by a technician. They would put a small piece of paper by the pull station, smoke or heat detector that indicated the date of the inspection.

that is mainly what a fire drill is it is a time to check if you know what your doing and inspect the alarms

A fire drill is not to test the fire alarm system as a whole, but to practice the evacuation of a building, hence the “drill” in fire drill.

Ideally, the drill button is pressed when a fire drill is conducted. This does not activate the system, but simply sound the dedicated NAs. Even if a pull station is activated, it does not test all of the other devices. I believe that facilities are required by law to have the systems tested (it may also depend on the state or AHJ).

The paper next to the devices is for records. It is so other technicians, or the facilities manager knows when the device was last tested.

I believe all schools had to do this just to make sure that all of the devices are working.

Yeah, each year in the schools in my area a technician would come to the school and inspect the pull stations, smoke detectors and heat detectors. I actually one year saw the technician come into our classroom to inspect the pull station.

Every building that has a fire alarm system is required to have its devices tested for functionality once a year by a qualified technician. Once the inspection is complete, a report is presented to the buildings owner (in the case of a school district it is usually someone in the district responsible for fire alarm maintainence) and, in the jurisdiction I live in, any deficiencies must be presented to the fire marshal. Fire alarm inspectors do not replace bad devices on the spot or fix other problems (IE a ground fault), that is up to the owner of the system to take care of bad devices and other deficiencies.

Patrick