You’re telling me! The Davis K-8 school had a LOT of bells! 6-inch Simplex bells behind grilles installed practically EVERYWHERE in the school!
It was bad enough during fire drills with all those Simplex 4051+80s, but the school bells were just as loud! I don’t think any of them were even disconnected! And the bells rang quite frequently, like maybe every 20-30 minutes. I don’t know, I never had to know the schedule for elementary like I did for middle and high schools. And the bells would also occasionally do brief 1/3-second rings too. I don’t know what that meant. Maybe it was supposed to be a warning that the late bell is about to go off.
You think that’s bad? Wait, there’s more: these were the bells outside:
10-INCH Simplex bells, also behind grilles! There were originally four of these outside. Today, one of them was plated over, and two others are disconnected, to my knowledge. This is the only one that still works, I think. Not only that, the main gymnasium also had these 10-inch bells too. THREE of them! Why the heck would Simplex put three 10-inch bells in a gym?! They could’ve just put in one or two 6-inch bells in there, and you would still hear them loud and clear.
With the fire drill connection: at the end of a fire drill the all-clear signal would be one long ring on the outside bells.
The Joseph H. Downey elementary school also had metal grilles like this, with some type of 6-inch bells in them, but these bells never worked! The grilles also contained the fire alarm signals in them (Fire-Lite 450 horns; it was a Gamewell Flexalarm system). A few places had buzzers in the clocks, but that was about it for class-change. The outdoor bells didn’t work either. And no bells also meant no audible all-clear signal at the end of fire drills. I think we just went in after waiting 30 seconds to a minute when the alarms were shut off.
But East Junior High School was a different story. They had Edwards 6-inch Adaptabels in a majority of places (unlike the Davis school, these bells were NOT installed behind grilles), and on the second floor, as well as near the main office and in one classroom hallway on the first floor, we had single-stroke chimes instead of bells. A few of the Adaptabels were disconnected too, including one outside the auditorium, and one outside the cafetera, and one near the main office (it made sense to disconnect it since there was a chime not too far from it). Outside we had a 4-inch Adaptabel (the only outside bell that worked correctly each time it rang), and various 10-inch bells (probably IBM) and at least one 4-inch IBM bell. One 10-inch bell was a single stroke bell, and another only worked on the first day of school (I only remember hearing that bell on my first day of eighth grade), but all the other bells didn’t work. I remember when I was starting 7th grade, I was nervous that it’d be just like the Davis school in terms of loudness of the bells. But it didn’t turn out to be so bad (unless I was right near an Adaptabel!) And like the Davis school, the all-clear signal at the end of fire drills was one long ring on the outside bells. (BTW, the fire alarms there was an OLD Gamewell system with really loud explosion-proof Federal Signal horns)
Brockton High School was the first (and only) school I attended that had a tone on the PA system for class-change. It wasn’t a very loud tone; not even in the gym, or the cafeterias (which had 8-10 loudspeakers in each one!) It was generally as loud as the alarm tone on the Carnival Victory’s PA speaker in our stateroom during a muster drill before we left. But if someone would shout into the PA system (“SENIORS, YOU HAVE SIX DAYS LEFT!!!”) then it’d be no picnic. We also had PA speakers outside too; the all-clear signals at the end of fire drills would be an announcement from the main office saying that it is safe to reenter the building.