Thursday, November 11, 2004

Lockdown Procedures

So...yesterday we had a one hour staff meeting primarily focused on lockdown procedures in our school district. Up until now, we have always practiced our lockdown drill by cramming 9 classes of 4th and 5th graders into our science lab (the only room with a door on our hall) and just sitting really still. (lol)
Now we have new procedures. For the new procedures, we are to do the following in the case of an armed and dangerous intruder IN our building.
1. Huddle our students on the wall closest to the hallway. We have no doors, so we just hide in a corner. Hopefully, bad guys aren't good at hide and seek.
2. Close the blinds. We have no door, but those blinds are shut, buddy. Maybe making it darker makes it harder for the bad guy to find us. It raises the bar on the hide and seek "strategery."
3. One teacher closes the doors at the end of the hallway to seal us into safety. (Unless said bad guy is on our hall, in which case we're up the creek)
4. We locate our light blue and light green index cards (provided free of charge by the police dept). If anyone is hurt, we write that on the light blue card and walk down the hall (suspect still at large, kids still stashed in corner) down the hall and slip that little note under the door for the SWAT team. If they're okay, we slip the light green one. If there's a green card, the SWAT team knows to go on. Notice that there are teachers just strolling about the halls during this calamity.
5. Once back in our darkened rooms, we are to sit with our (calm, silent) children in the corner and under no circumstances are we to make a phone call. They might be calling us with special instructions. Because the ringing and answering of a phone probably wouldn't clue the criminal in on where we were cleverly concealed.
  • Note: I asked the police officer why we didn't use red and green cards [stop? go?] and forego the writing and he stated that the red cards might cause the children to be alarmed. The hiding in the corner from the psychopath with the gun wouldn't cause any permanent damage, but that red card might really put them over the edge.

Next, the officer brought up the fact that there's always a chance that a suspect would pull a fire alarm to try to extract people from their secret hiding places. So in that case, we're just supposed to make a judgment call on whether to flee or hide. What's a teacher to do? I'll be on the phone trying to figure out where my pastel index cards are.

2 comments:

Katie Bonk said...

It's legal to carry a concealed weapon in Texas, right? Maybe you need to start packin' heat to protect you and the kids from the bad guys!

Editor in Chief said...

Well, considering where you teach, changes are good that one of your kids will have "protection" so just borrow theirs.