By: Anna Bella D’Amico
As many of us know, over the last few weeks East has practiced emergency drills to ensure students’ safety if an actual incident were to occur. During a fire drill, the majority of the student body can agree that we are successfully able to get out quickly and safely.
However, when it comes to performing lockdown drills, East certainly needs more practice. While students on the second and third floors respected the rules, students who were evacuated treated the emergency drill as a time to socialize. Ranging from 9th grader Sloane Blair to 11th grader Maggie Verrico, some agreed that students have a complete disregard for any type of emergency preparedness. Some students were talking, taking Snapchats, and overall goofing around during the emergency drill. The main suggestion that students, such as 9th grader Ryan Mitchell, gave was that East could be in really good shape if we just did what we were told to do.
Mr. Hurley, the school librarian, was appalled by the way the students who were in the library handled the drill. They moved slowly and did not follow his explicit instructions to sit down and be quiet.
After the rest of the building was dismissed, Mr. Hurley held back those students. He said, “This drill used to be called an ‘Active Shooter,’ drill, and just because they changed the name to be more politically correct, doesn’t mean that the gist of the drill has changed. In order to know what to do, students have to pay attention to their surroundings. It could be their road to safety.”
Being aware of these tragedies is very important in students’ safety. It has been two years after the Sandy Hook shooting, and there have since been over 100 school shootings in the United States. That’s essentially averaging one shooting a week. Nearly 70% of these incidents have involved minors, and 53% have occurred in a K-12 building. In addition, 69% resulted in at least one death. It is ignorant to assume that something like this can never happen at our school, and the fact that East doesn’t have walls makes it all the more dangerous.
Our administrative staff presumes that the threat will likely occur on the first floor, in which they will evacuate the entire first floor and lock any doors that lead up to the second and third floor. In the drill, the first floor is led off campus, and each teacher has a roster to fill out with all of his or her kids. They then either hold up a green piece of cardboard if everything is good, or a red piece of cardboard if they need assistance or are missing kids. If the threat is on the second or third floor, the entire building will be evacuated. If you are on the second floor, you can either leave via the Auditorium or the stairwells. The third floor has no choice but to take the stairs. To prevent a threat from entering the building, you have to be buzzed in after first period, and somebody at the welcome desk will require you to sign in.
Danny Sacco, a school safety correspondent who has not worked with the Williamsville Central School District, reviewed the emergency plans of East and said that even though we do an adequate job, schools cannot be fully prepared for a threat in the building. He said that nobody should be able to walk into a school building and have access to such a large amount of its population. With all of its open area, the Commons is everyone’s first concern.
Sacco said there is a philosophy about shooting, “What you can’t see, you can’t shoot.” Our lack of enclosed rooms poses a different challenge than most schools. East was built 40 years ago when school shootings weren’t even on the radar of administrators. Sacco said he fears that due to the open nature of our school, it could become an easier target.
But he also understands that when you increase security, you decrease convenience. The students all love the openness and freedom East presents, and as the East Side News has reported in the past, students are well aware of the risks of having few enclosed spaces for protection.
Indeed, some school shootings, like the Columbine shooting in 1999 or the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, can still have terrible results even with walls, doors, and locks. In Columbine, the shooters targeted students in a typical cafeteria, and in Virginia the shooter walked into dorm rooms and killed students, peeked inside classrooms before making his next decision, and killed many students who were inside rooms trying to erect a barricade.
Although we do have some challenges, our administrators have indeed worked hard over to make our school safer. They added a button that Mr. Taylor can press to lock all the doors leading to second and third floor, as well as adding a key card swipe and buzzer to the main entrance. They also added walls in the English department to separate classrooms and help with shielding the view. Without walls, students do have immediate access to windows and multiple stairways for evacuation.
The students here want to be assured that they are going to be safe no matter where they are in the building. The purpose for the emergency drills is to educate the faculty and staff on what to do in a crisis, and provide ample practice to know the strategy should an event arise.
All our students want is the feeling of highest level of security and safety, and acknowledge that school safety is an on-going process. Being prepared and knowing the different strategies is the best way to handle the possibility of some kind of threat. So next time there is a drill, take it seriously. Your life may depend on it.
