When the fire alarms rang loudly at 11:02 a.m. on May 10 before 4C lunch, many students grew anxious as they evacuated, knowing it was no drill as planned fire drills wouldn’t interrupt the lunch schedule. However, school activities resumed as normal at 11:22 a.m., including the AP Macroeconomic test set for noon local time in RM 233, as students began bubbling at 11:31 and started the exam at 12. According to FHC administrators, a fire-pull station tripped and set off the alarm. No student or staff was involved in the alarm being tripped.
Despite the lack of an issue, the local fire department showed up within five minutes after students evacuated. Mrs. Cassandra Flores, a librarian at FHC, said keeping track of attendance is very important in potential emergency situations.
“If something were to happen in an emergency situation, we know exactly who’s in here,” Mrs. Flores said. “It’s a little scary for us because we just had so many people in the library, more than we normally do, and we just wanted to really make sure we had everyone accounted for.”
At first, FHC administrators emailed only the new schedule for the rest of the day, not including how the fire alarm was tripped. Mrs. Flores said the communication delay didn’t affect her at all, but she thinks there was a lot of confusion and anxiety for the students.
“Multiple kids asked me outside, ‘Am I going to eat lunch?’ Which of course, we’re gonna make sure everyone gets to eat lunch during the school day, but [there was] definitely some confusion and anxiety surrounding that,” Mrs. Flores said. “We hear the drill, we all evacuate. We did so quickly, and things went back to normal.”
AP coordinator and social studies teacher Mrs. Christine Russek said if the fire drill would’ve messed up the AP test mandatory afternoon schedule, there are systems in place.
“Students would leave their test booklets and everything else in the room and would be at arms length of the proctor [in the evacuation area] and then they would come back in [and begin/resume testing],” Mrs. Russek said.
Since more students leave class at the end of the year to other areas of the school and through blended learning, Mrs. Flores describes how this makes keeping track of students’ attendance even more necessary and difficult.
“We get to the end of the year, and there’s more people who are leaving class to do independent work. But yes, there are times when we have like 50 kids in here during the hour and so if something happens, we just really want to make sure that we know everyone has been here because it’s kind of hard once we leave to keep track of everyone,” Mrs. Flores said.
