When the fire alarm goes off, it seems that Woodside students move slowly, or don’t move at all; instead of moving to Bradley Field, they shrug it off and ignore it rather than take it seriously.
Throughout the last four years, the fire alarm has been falsely set off due to construction work and student behavior, normalizing the emergency bell and causing students to potentially ignore real threats of danger.
The Sequoia School District Nurse Kristin Coronado is worried that “students have been desensitized by the alarms going off frequently when there is no emergency.”
The most recent fire alarm was set off by inappropriate behavior from students in the I-wing bathroom, as confirmed by Woodside Assistant Vice Principal, Chuck Velschow. As the alarm went off, students hesitated to move and automatically assumed it was another false alarm.
Even though, most of the time, no one is in immediate danger, the hesitation to act quickly and follow protocols creates an unsafe environment for possible future emergencies.
Nurse Coronado has every right to worry. Many students, like Woodside High School Junior Kevin DeAntoni, represents many students when he expresses confusion about how to react when the alarm sounds.
“I never really know whether it’s a false alarm or not and have gotten used to it going off and it being false,” DeAntoni said.
Velschow believes that the false alarms have become less frequent than last year.
He said, “It definitely felt like last year it was very annoying, and it often felt like every time the fire alarm would go off you would go ‘okay is this real, or is it just another drill’ and you finally get to the point that you are not going to take anything serious.”
The false alarms are not only a safety hazard, but are also a learning distraction for the student body. The school administration wants to minimize and create the best learning environment possible.
“We purposely schedule the fire drills during SSR (Silent Sustained Reading) in order to minimize how much class time is affected,” Velschow explained.
Even though the false alarms can be a hassle, the administrators encourage the Woodside student body to take every alarm seriously.
Velschow said, “When the fire alarm goes off you should follow procedure and do the things that you are suppose to do.”
