Practice Makes Perfect
For decades, American school children have practiced fire drills as often as monthly to ensure they react safely and swiftly in the event of fire. The fire code requirements mandating these exercises stemmed from disasters that claimed dozens of young lives and remain in effect despite — if not because of — the fact so few have perished in similar circumstances since they took effect.
The conditions under which such requirements came into force bears some scrutiny today as at least one school district in Maryland asks whether fire drills have become outmoded, if not simply outdated.
Neglected maintenance and decaying school infrastructure — which included combustible interior finishes, unprotected exit pathways, and poor maintenance or outright absence of fire-safety features like alarms and manual firefighting equipment — contributed to disaster. The 1958 fire at Our Lady of Angels school in Chicago, which claimed the lives of 92 children and three teachers, serves as a chilling example of what can happen. This fire, more than any other, served as the impetus for most of the requirements we take for granted today.
We could ask ourselves whether things have changed much. Many school districts cite aging infrastructure and competition over declining tax revenues as a major concern. At the same time, they face new threats never really envisioned when the current fire code requirements first came into effect.
School violence has jumped ahead of fire safety as a concern in most schools, although recent evidence that such dangers are less prevalent today that just a few years ago.
Nevertheless, at the insistence of parents and politicians, many schools have instituted comprehensive security programs that include access control, barriers, and individual screening. Armed security guards now patrol schools in many communities, meaning that firearms are now commonplace on many campuses.
In response to advice from security consultants and experience of massacres like the Columbine High School shootings in April 1999, many schools have gone so far as to institute complex lockdown procedures for securing students in classrooms in the event of an “active shooter” incident.
Decisions about whether to stay or go during a fire make a crucial difference in who lives and who dies. Neither strategy works flawlessly all of the time, and which action works best in any set of circumstances requires careful consideration of both what is happening and what is already in place to manage its continued development.
In essence then, fire drills have already moved from being simple rule-based exercises in which everyone follows a simple set of instructions that are more or less standard for any public building — hear the alarm, get out, and stay out — to very particular instructions tailored to individual buildings and quite often tailored to the very peculiar ways in which each of these buildings and the people within them operate.
By their nature, fire code requirements have difficulty accommodating the necessity of such diversity. We would like to believe that by reducing complex problems to their essence, we can discern a set of rules by which everyone will be properly instructed in what is safe.
Maybe the time has come for us to reconsider the purpose of fire drills. I can think of no better context for such reconsideration of their utility than schools. We can start by deciding whether fire drills represent a test or simply an opportunity to practice and learn not only what works best but how to appreciate what makes it work when needed.
Fire drills work poorly as tests, unless, of course, we take the opportunity to learn from what went right, what went wrong, or at least what we can improve the next time. The efficient conduct of fire drills involves much more than assessing the travel time of students and staff. The time it takes to get everyone where they need to be depends more on how long it takes them to decide the proper course of action and implement their decision. Even necessary distractions like determining where particular students are or whether the fire blocks an escape route can have a significant effect on the time taken to complete an evacuation.
With the introduction of complex security procedures in schools, the decisions teachers must make about what to do and how to do it have become much more involved than they were right after the Our Lady of Angels tragedy. When a fire alarm sounds, we like to think that we need not think about whether it signals a real fire or not, the action should be the same either way. But now we must consider whether the activation of a fire alarm places teachers and pupils at-risk if the sounding alarm is used as a means to draw people into the line of fire.
Despite the fact the number of school children and teacher dying due to gunfire in schools is dropping, it remains evident that this risk remains as high or higher than that from fires. If we are truly committed to the safety of schools, we should be thinking of ways to ensure they prepare those who use them for all sorts of emergencies.
We know the importance of exercises and experience in honing the effectiveness of fireground decision-makers. Why not apply the same reasoning to the preparing school administrators, teachers, and staff who must look after the safety of young people in the ever more complex world in which we live? In the absence of significant new spending on school buildings, we are becoming ever more reliant on their ability to get things right.
