The fire alarm goes off, the announcements come on, and students get up and start to file out of the building for yet another evacuation.

This year, in the short amount of time Pentucket High School students have been in school, they have already experienced two evacuations from the building.  One was an evacuation, in the first week of school due to a gas leak, and the other due to a bomb threat just recently. In previous years the students have been in lockdown twice during school hours as well for threats against students .

Public schools are required, by law, to enforce any lockdown or evacuation in case of an emergency to protect the students from any immediate danger. The issue that arises from these time consuming evacuations is the numerous amounts of false alarms that come from school systems.

Police, fire trucks, ambulances, etc., are all called to the scene during these events, to assist staff in eliminating the threat to the students. What happens when these are all just false alarms?

They search the school, find nothing, and then leave? It seems almost like a waste of time for all these professionals to be called to the sight of an evacuation if there is really no issue at hand.

Obviously, the police cannot decide to just not show up at the sight of a school lockdown because they think it is another false alarm, we all know that the one time they didn’t show up would be the time there is a real problem. So the police and firemen and the whole crowd will always be showing up to any problem at school that puts students in any kind of danger, because, believe it or not, they are here to keep us safe.

Students need to learn that if they think pulling the fire alarm to get out of class is a good idea or writing a threatening message on the wall to evacuate the school is funny, then there is completely different issue at hand.

Putting the school in a panic and calling policemen, firemen, and other safety officers to the scene “just because” is a terrible idea and quite frankly very annoying. False alarms that result in school evacuations of lockdowns are not something to joke around about. The safety of students of students is and always will be a top priority to communities, so creating unnecessary alarming situations is completely uncalled for.