Fire and Evacuation Drills
As stated before, our emphasis and main priority is always on the safety and security of our students and staff members. In order to do this, we do frequent drills to practice our safety processes. One of those drills involves evacuating the building in the case of fire or other circumstances. By state law, every school must complete a fire drill every month of the school year. At Westfield Washington Schools, we take this drill one step further and as a district we mandate that our fire drills not only occur during normal class time, but we also take time to practice them during our lunch periods and passing periods. We also occasionally block an exit so that the teachers and students must be aware of alternate routes to exit the building. Several times we have representatives from the Westfield Fire Department and/or Hamilton County Emergency Management come and observe our drills and give us advice and suggestions. Our goal is to teach our students and staff members to be aware of all of their options in the case of an emergency and give them the tools to ensure their safety. After every drill, the administrative team debriefs the drill and looks for ways to make improvements to the process.
In future blog postings, I’ll touch on additonal steps that we take in our district to make Westfield Washington Schools a safe and healthy environment for all.
