Drills

By Erin Rose Fauchon
Sometimes we think those drills we perform in school are just silly, and pointless, but when a real emergency comes, none of us would know what to do. We had a drill about what we would do if a shooter had come into the school. This drill had us turn the lights and smart boards off, lock the door, stay away from windows, get low, and stay to the back of the room. Because of this drill, we will know what to do if something were to happen.
On Monday, November 29th, a 15 year old boy named Samuel Hengel in Wisconsin held his class at gunpoint. No one is sure what motivated this, but they all knew he was well-liked. The teacher and students had kept themselves calm while all this was going on. His classmates had even talked to him about his favorite activities to keep Samuel Hengel as calm as they all tried to be. After holding his class for about six hours, he has shot himself and died in the hospital the next day.
It is incidents like this and what had happened April 20th, 1999 at Columbine, which created the need to these types of drills. It’s like how incidents like the Our Lady of the Angels was one of the fires to have us have those drills, many lives could be lost. This fire had occurred in a catholic school in Chicago in 1958. There were 1,600 people in the school at the time and 95 had lost their lives. This school had very little way to get out of it and due to this, the death toll had risen.
When the fire alarm goes off, many believe it’s a drill. Much of the time it is, and that is why many students don’t take it seriously. There is no order when trying to get out of the building, everyone is talking, people try to find their friends, and some don’t even bother leaving the school because they know it’s just a drill. Many students don’t take school drills seriously but, if we didn’t have these drills, people would die. These drills are to teach people what to do in an emergency and the only people taking it seriously are the principals. We need to take it into our own hands to be serious during these drills and to make sure we know what to do. Next time might not be a drill.