School fire drills

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I used to be a little afraid of fire alarms, simply because of the volume.

At high school though people would set them off to get out of lessons at least once or twice a week, so I got used to them.

My ES and MS both have the chevron pulls branded Faraday.

Well, down in Florida, school fires happen once in a blue moon. In all my years in Palm Beach County, there has not been one single school fire ever! And yet, my old school insisted we have at least seven fire drills a month! Our school was voted the "Safest School in the County" three times in a row. I think they should replace the word "safest" w/ "most paranoid". Fire drills are good and all, and prepare you for the worst, but when you live in as state that hasn't had a school fire in almost 20 years, it should be saved for at least two times a month.

SEVEN??! ! And I thought NJ's law of two per month was a bit excessive...

Today when we were heading out to practice marching for a parade and a half time show, we made it just in time for a fire alarm, when everyone was exiting the building, and it looked as if we were marching out there because of the fire alarm. It was funny and cool at the same time; then, the drum major turned us around and we started marching away very fast so we could get on the field. Everybody was laughing their heads off because we were just looking silly marching outside with everyone casually walking out of the building.

Isn't Florida great?

I am not scared of fire alarms. But once I worse these shoes, you see. And they only had really tiny heels. But I have stooped posture, and of course, the one day that I stupidly wear these god forsaken shoes, we have a fire drill. I pretty near killed myself walkng up and down the stairs, and outside on the sidewalk.

Since then, I have often dreamed of being in school, grabbing these shoes off my feet, running down the hallway down to the tech ed. room, and sawing the heels off....

I'm taking this thread in another direction now. Has anyone, at any point in their school career, ever been notified ahead of time about fire drills due to their condition? I probably should have done this in K-12 school, but was afraid to. Now, however, I am seriously considering being notified about the two fire drills that will occur in my dorm this year, as well as any other planned fire alarm activations (tests etc). In the past three years, my dorms had voice systems that didn't bother me much, but now this year I'm in a dorm with Simplex electromechanical horns, and I'm worried about how loud/obnoxious they might be. So, what I'm thinking of is being notified not so that I could avoid the drill, but so that I could get a "preview" of the alarms so that I know what to expect if it goes off at 4 am.

So has anyone done this? How should I go about it? Will merely saying I have AS be enough, or will I need documentation?

One of my teachers would tell us when we were having a fire drill on the day we were having it. I only had her for one class (physics), so that was interesting. Our fire alarm is a continuous bell, which sounds just like the regular school bell. I also go to an outside school (where the entire school is not built into a single building and the halls are not inside), so the noise does not seem to get as trapped as it would indoors.

Have you ever wondered why they have earthquake alarms? What's the point of the alarm, the ground is shaking beneath you (lol)! But, yeah, firealarms are really loud, but the whole school is notified if we have a firealarm on the day, but the period and the time are kept secret so that it could be a 'surprise'.

There are no earthquake alarms that I know of. Except when a tremor causes car alarms to go off. I don't beleive there would be a built-in alarm that would go off when a building shakes because buildings move all the time when settling or if a big truck passes by. Alarms like that would go off left and right.

But if you are at school or anywhere and an earthquake hits. Then the building or any location may be able to ring an alarm to tell everyone to evacuate a number of seconds after a shaker hits.
I think when an earthquake hit when I was in class duing HS, the standard earthquake bells rang a few times.

Oh my gosh, I can't believe someone has posted this thread!

In Elementary school, I HATED the fire alarm! Routinely I'd cover my ears over large parts of classes for fear of it going off. After we had our quota of 2 a month (guess that gives away the state I lived in at the time), I'd breathe a sigh of relief and uncover my ears. I even had this elaborate way of using one hand and one shoulder to cover both ears while still having a hand free to do work. I can't think of how many teacher lectures I simply didn't hear because of the hand/shoulders/ears thing, but I got straight As all the time so the teachers didn't seem to care. One asked me about it once, another pointed out to the class I was covering my ears in an attempt to guilt-trip the class into quieting down, but no real drama over that.

In case you're wondering, the alarm at my elementary school was a very loud bell, at least twice as loud as the regular bell, and it had a shrillness to it that really drove me nuts. By 4th or 5th grade, however, it was only really the first second or two of the bell that drove me nuts, the rest of it was fine. Middle school and the first part of high school had a mych quieter bell (that rang in distinct "dings" vs. a steady screaming noise), and in the second half of high school a new ADA-compliant system was put in with flashing lights that started a second before the actual whistle-like digital noise. One could actually hear the system "warm up" and start seeing the flashes a second or two before the alarm went off, so that was fine. In college the alarms seem to be in the hallways, and while they're quite audible, the muffling of the door makes it better. We also only seem to get one fire drill a semester here, versus the two-per-month back home.

But yes, the elementary school bell. This was over a decade ago, before AS was even official, much less actually known to educators. I've never been diagnosed with anything, but I know a lot of those symptoms sound a lot like my life (much more so as a child than now, the last two years have been of tremendous change. I also have friends on the spectrum, and keep up with what's going on in spectrum-related issues because of that too). As a result of that and so many of my other quirks from elementary school, G-d knows if I'd have been able to stay in a mainstream environment without the school attempting to force special ed on my folks for me today, if not for AS being on the books, then for whatever other label they throw on boys who do not act in a very narrowly-defined, often contradictory manner in school. Looking back, I really do wonder about that.

I live in California, fairly near the San Andreas Fault, so we have earthquake drills nearly as often (if not more so) than fire drills at my school. There is one loud bell, and we all have to duck and cover under our desks (or tables, depending on the classroom). About a minute later, there is a second bell, and we all file out into the school parking lot and the teachers take role once we're out there, which takes about 15 minutes. After that, we usually go back to the classroom and resume whatever we've been doing. Teachers know ahead of time when we're having a drill, so they can plan tests and quizzes accordingly, which is nice.

We've never had a large enough earthquake to have the alarm go off, but I assume they would just ring the schoolbell and everyone would know it was an earthquake 'cause we'd all be able to feel the ground shaking. The last major earthquake in the area that I live was the Loma Prietta in September/October of 1989.

I'll have to find the article, but the "duck and cover" survival method is a flawed idea and really has a near 100% fatality rate in practice.

That seems reasonable. I think it's only been decent (or at least half-way) for very mild earthquakes, where the only real danger is that we all fall out of our chairs to begin with.

I used to do this, even a bit into high school. By my junior year, I was able to control the urge to cover my ears constantly, but I still did so once when my PE teacher announced that there would be a drill soon. I got made fun of this for the rest of the year, and was so traumatized that I had to switch schools the next year (from a Catholic to a public school). After that, though, I forced myself to resist all urges to cover my ears - even once during computer class when a popup appeared on the screen saying there was going to be a drill towards the end of the period. And guess what? It didn't happen.



It's the same way with me this year. We have horns in the hallways, and after last night's fire drill, I can tell you that it's not that loud from inside my room. I was worried before I actually heard the alarm (I had sleepless nights and everything) because I thought it might be super-loud, but that wasn't the case. Now, in my previous 3 years of college, my dorms had voice systems, with speakers in the rooms. I was nervous my freshman year before I first heard the alarm, but once I heard how soft it was, my fears all but went out the window.