Building Safety

Emergency Drills
At the beginning of every year, we conduct regular emergency preparedness drills.  As adults, most of us remember fire drills as children:  lining up quietly, no talking, a slight sense of boredom tempered with apprehension.  Our older students are fairly skilled at fire drills. Our youngest students are always more surprised by the loud alarms and flashing lights. We are required by state law to conduct 8 fire drills before December 1.  Our first fire drill will be Monday afternoon. We let everyone know about this first drill because we need to rehearse behaviors and fire drill exits.  The other fire drills will not be announced.

Back in the day, when I was growing up in the suburbs of Chicago in the mid 1960's, we had "tornado drills" in addition to fire drills. Tornado drills meant we had to duck and cover in the hallways.  Maybe these drills really were for tornadoes. We had those in Chicago.  However, as an adult, I realized that maybe these drills weren't just for tornadoes.

Nowadays, we don't have duck and cover drills any more.  Instead, and this is scarier, we have lock down drills to rehearse what might happen in case of intruders.  We rehearse these lock down drills with students.  Teachers check hallways for students, lock their doors, and everyone clusters together in the classroom, silently, out of sight of the doorway. Our Building Response Team (BRT) checks hallways, stairwells and bathrooms for students and possible "intruders."  Teachers explain the drills to students in developmentally appropriate ways and, when we have the drill, everyone knows it is a drill.  We will have two lock down drills by Thanksgiving. One is a simple lockdown drill. The other, a missing child drill, is experienced similarly by students but the BRT has a slightly different job.

All our drills are conducted according to emergency management and DOE procedures. They will be explained in more depth at our Town Hall Safety meeting on October 9 at 8 am (just before the PTA meeting.)

Visitors and Volunteers
All those drills are great practice in case something unexpected might happen.  As you can imagine, we have systems in place to try to prevent these events.

We have two fabulous School Safety Agents in our school, Antoinette Dyall and Elsie Rolon.  They survey the building, monitor cameras, and ensure that visitors to the building sign in according to protocols.  All visitors to the building are required to show photo id.

Most visitors to 276 are parents who are volunteering at lunch, in the library, or in classrooms. This year, volunteers to our building will be given green lanyards with their destination/purpose indicated on the badge and reminders of volunteer guidelines.  These lanyards will be more visible to people in our community than the little stickers we have been using in the past.

If staff see someone in the building without a green lanyard or who is not in the expected place (cafeteria, yard, library, etc.), we will ask if any help is needed. This is intended as a polite hint that you should not be wandering.  If necessary, people without a clear and appropriate purpose in the building will be escorted to the building exit.

Door Alarms
Additionally, we are very serious about not using the Second Place doorway as an entrance or exit to the building.  Everyone is expected to enter and exit through the main entrance. The Second Place Entrance is alarmed. When the alarm goes off, it launches a specific emergency protocol taking teachers and administration away from the important work of teaching the children.

EVEN IF, the door is open for arrival or dismissal, you should NOT use this door.  Thanks in advance for your cooperation.

Don't forget to come to the Town Hall Safety Meeting at 8 am on October 9.