It's a Fire Drill. Lay Off!

[Nashida]

Been a while since I got to post in this section.

I've been at my new job for over a month now. I'm an assistant toddler teacher at a day care center in the city. I love it, the kids are fun to work with and the parents are (believe it or not) lovely and wonderful to work with.

Today our schedule got thrown out of whack by our monthly fire drill. My co-teacher and I round up our 6 kidlets and get ready to head outside. The kids were handing this well; each of us got 3 kids and they held our hands the whole time, they didn't try to run off and the noise didn't seem to bother them.

Our escape path took us out of the building, across a street and down a sidewalk next to the library. My supervisor, henceforth known as D, is standing in the street acting as a crossing guard so people wouldn't try to run over us as we crossed, since there were a lot of small children out.

Nonetheless, there were still quite a few jerks who would try to blow past her, missing her by inches, or would roll down the window and start screaming at us when we crossed the street. Some would even lay on the horn, which would scare the children who weren't expecting such a loud noise. It was awful. There were a couple times where my co-teacher and I worried that one of our crew would get hit, no one was willing to be patient enough until the whole thing was over. It took maybe two minutes out of their time.

The kicker? There was a policeman up at the front of the building with the fire patrol. He missed the whole thing, otherwise there would have been some sweet, swift justice.

[dbuzman]

The drivers were very sucky but the school needs to redo the evac route so you don't need to cross a street.

[persephone]

The drivers were very sucky but the school needs to redo the evac route so you don't need to cross a street.

Depending on where the school is, that may not be possible. Most state's have specific requirements for fire and / or other evacuation drills for schools stating that, for the safety of the children and others, they must be a certain distance away from the school. They may HAVE to cross a street in order to meet the requirement.

Though is there a way to see if there is somewhere you can go without having to cross a street?

[Jetfire]

When they do a fire drill at one of my city's high school, they make sure to warn everyone that it is going to happen, because the school itself is on one of the main commercial streets in the city, and the evacuation route crosses one of the main north/south arterials. So when a drill is planned (like in the news paper article I linked), they make sure people are well informed and encourage them to take alternate routes if they can.

[NateTheChops]

Reason numeral a bajillion why I hate the majority of drivers out there. They're basically vehiciular homicide charges waiting to happen.

[Rena_Muffin]

Wow. You are such a better person than me Nashida. I would have started screaming back the second they started laying on the horn. Rule #1 in my book, you don't mess with kids.

[Mikkel]

Perhaps a word to the policeman will help next time .

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Depending on where the school is, that may not be possible. Most state's have specific requirements for fire and / or other evacuation drills for schools stating that, for the safety of the children and others, they must be a certain distance away from the school. They may HAVE to cross a street in order to meet the requirement.

Though is there a way to see if there is somewhere you can go without having to cross a street?

I'm not sure that's such a great idea either. In every fire drill I participated in, we stayed in view of the exit we came out of. In elementary and junior high that didn't mean crossing any streets because the school was set back far enough. In high school we had to cross a driveway that looped around a statue and wasn't all that busy during school hours.

If you walk down the sidewalk away from the school instead of crossing a street but staying near the school, you might not notice if one of your students is missing. And if a student gets out of the building a little later, or uses an exit other than his/her class's because he/she was in the bathroom or someplace else when the fire alarm sounded, he/she might panic.

[Nashida]

Depending on where the school is, that may not be possible. Most state's have specific requirements for fire and / or other evacuation drills for schools stating that, for the safety of the children and others, they must be a certain distance away from the school. They may HAVE to cross a street in order to meet the requirement.

Though is there a way to see if there is somewhere you can go without having to cross a street?

Unfortunately, no. The building is located near two main drags and a tiny one way street. We crossed the one way street to reach the library, and that's where we were having problems.

I asked my supervisor if there was a way to close off that road to thru traffic when we have a fire drill, but there isn't one (which I guess makes sense). And that route is unfortunately very poor; if we had been back in our classroom rather than the aerobics room, we would have cut through the playground instead, avoiding traffic altogether. From where we were that wasn't an option.

[bainsidhe]

Since the school knows about the drill ahead of time, is the person halting traffic at least properly clothed? For example, many crossing guards have a reflective/highly visible jacket and will hold up a sign signaling traffic to stop. You'll still have the sucky drivers, but this will make things more...official? If I saw a plain-clothed person holding up traffic, my gut reaction would be annoyance. Seeing a properly marked crossing guard would cause me to be more patient.

[houdini]

It's all very well warning drivers if there is going to be a drill, but what happens if it's the real thing? The drivers may not be aware of a fire if it's the other side of the building or inside - it's scary to think that they might behave in exactly the same way in a real emergency situation!

[Argus]

Since the school knows about the drill ahead of time, is the person halting traffic at least properly clothed? For example, many crossing guards have a reflective/highly visible jacket and will hold up a sign signaling traffic to stop.

If that's a good idea during a drill, it would also be a good idea during an actual fire. If the school has such a jacket and/or sign, they might look into placing/hanging them near the door used for evacuation so that they can be grabbed while on the way out.

[mattm04]

Depending on where the school is, that may not be possible. Most state's have specific requirements for fire and / or other evacuation drills for schools stating that, for the safety of the children and others, they must be a certain distance away from the school. They may HAVE to cross a street in order to meet the requirement.

Though is there a way to see if there is somewhere you can go without having to cross a street?

Good point. In my town all the public schools (1 each elementary, middle and HS) are on a campus with the public library. While it is public road it is two lanes each direction whit a median.

During fire drills or even a real incident (broken sprinkler line shortly before the first class started) the FD never payed attention to the requirement of X feet unless it was a major incident, say a gas leak. If they needed to move people for one school to another for shelter it only took one strategically placed police car to shut down traffic to any part or all of the campus to facilitate the easy moment of people.

[emt_cookies]

In my state, no one at the school has to be aware of a fire drill. In fact, my instructor (my department's fire inspector) chewed out an administrator for informing his teachers of the fire drill in an email before it happened so a newspaper warning is probably out of the question. If our inspector could access the panel without setting of the tamper alarms, he would have the fire drills unannounced. The previous one would show up and set off the alarms unannounced.

[Lots42]

Depending on where the school is, that may not be possible. Most state's have specific requirements for fire and / or other evacuation drills for schools stating that, for the safety of the children and others, they must be a certain distance away from the school. They may HAVE to cross a street in order to meet the requirement.

Though is there a way to see if there is somewhere you can go without having to cross a street?

My middle school did a bomb drill. My class sat in spitball distance of a brick wall. We had ACRES of sports fields stretching far, far away from that stupid joint.