Fire Alarm Disorder (By: Mark Zhang)
Many people remember evacuating the school due to a fire alarm on Thursday, October 25 at 1:34 pm. Due to the very inconvenient timing and lack of instructions, it may have been the most disarranged evacuation R.E Mountain has ever had.
The main issue was that the alarm sounded in between the last two blocks that day, when most of the students were still in the hallways, causing much confusion as to where to go. Because of this, many students were unsure of which teacher to go to and were unable to check in for attendance.
One teacher, from her relatively high vantage point over the disorganized throng of people noted that it was “absolute chaos”. This was not the only teacher to feel this way, as almost none of the teachers were able to find their students, if any. This caused over twenty minutes of class time to be lost, abnormally long for a situation where there wasn’t a real fire.
Many students also may not have known at the time that there was a regulation for the exact situation that they were in. It was apparently announced at the beginning of the school year that in the event that a fire alarm sounds in between two periods, students are to evacuate to the previously designated area and check in with the teacher of the block that just ended.
Neither the faculty nor the students were to blame for this disorganization. The situation was so unlikely that the rules regarding it didn’t phase anyone’s memory, though the teachers did their best and informed students who had already arrived at their next block whereabouts to go.
It has been confirmed that in this case it was not a scheduled drill, that the alarm was in fact pulled by a student whose identity will not be disclosed. The reasoning and motivation behind the culprit’s actions still remains unknown.