Editorial: Excess Safety Drills

It’s getting warm outside again, and we all know what that means: drills upon drills upon drills.  While fire drills, lockdown drills, and lock-in drills are run so that students and faculty are comfortable with the safety procedures in case of an emergency, these measures desensitize the students from emergency situations in reality.

It’s incredibly important that school personnel do not panic and that they know what to do during an emergency, and the only way to teach this is by running drills.  However, when students and teachers are too exposed to these drills, it creates a problem on the opposite end of the spectrum.  People become overly comfortable with these drills, so when it’s time for another, they assume that it is not a real emergency.  This leads to students staying in the building for an extra minute or two when they should be evacuating or being disruptive during a silent drill because they do not take the threat seriously.

This could be a matter of life or death in a true emergency situation, so it is crucial for the safety of everyone involved that these drills are treated like emergencies. This simply cannot happen if there is an excess amount of drills.

Not only do these drills lead students and faculty to take emergency situations lightly, but they are also a disruption to valuable class time.  Fire drills can sometimes take up to thirty minutes, and while this may not seem like much, the drills do add up.  This can take away from students’ understandings of various topics or potentially make the teacher rush a unit that must meet a deadline, such as the end of a quarter.

The Schreiber Times believes that although our school should run a certain amount of drills to ensure that the Schreiber community is prepared for an emergency, the current amount of drills that takes place is unnecessary and perhaps even harmful.