Throughout the school year, we do rounds of drills to keep students safe if there is an emergency. The drills we do are tornado, fire, and intruder. All of them are important and need to be taken seriously. Kids tend to use these times to mess around and think it’s just taking time out of their class so it doesn’t matter.
One of the most important drills in today’s world is the intruder drill, due to all the school shooting threats going around. It’s not a joke and is not something that should be taken lightly. When doing drills all students should have to do what is asked of them and take it seriously. Our school has fortunately never had to experience a school shooting threat, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen any time of day. On Oct. 9, our school had an intruder drill. During this intruder drill many students and teachers failed this test. The students were told to exit the back doors when the teachers had no clue where the intruder was in the building. The kids then went down the stairs and ended up right next to the shooter. After that, the kids were told that they would have died if this was real and then were told to go back to class. Once they got back to class they just went back to their regular classes and continued to learn about their topics. Throughout the day students were talking about the drill and were just laughing about it as it was just a joke and funny. Yes, this was just a drill, but how are kids and teachers going to know what to do in this kind of situation if we never take the drills seriously?
After the drill teachers need to give time for open communication with the class to discuss any problems or concerns about the drill. Most teachers have all the students get back to class and get right back to work instead of talking about it. Yes, our learning is important and teachers want as much time as possible to teach their students but we need to make sure we have the little safety things covered before anything else. Most of the things you hear from people when they fail this kind of test is “Oh we didn’t know the drill started.” The thing is that when there is a shooter in the school there is never a start time and there might be a time when you don’t even know where the shooter is. Everyone just needs to be prepared for something like this to happen at any time.
As of October 3, there have been around 58 school shootings this year. School shootings are rare but they still do happen.
The same goes for all of the safety drills our school does. The intruder drill is just the more common one that needs to be known in today’s world.
