Drills, drills, nothing but drills

Last week, the faculty at the intermediate school was informed that during thunderbolt time one day there was going to be a series of drills. Why they decided to do all of them at the same time, I will never know, but during one of the drills, they had to find their 6th period teacher and report to them. Keep in mind that Mr. Schmidt's 6th period class is the 7th grade band made up of 60 kids. The first drill was an earthquake drill and was done in their actual thunderbolt time class. Since we don't have a thunderbolt time at the moment, Mr. Schmidt and I just turned out the lights in the classroom and pretended we weren't there so we wouldn't get in trouble for completely ignoring the drill.

The second was a fire drill. This was fairly standard where everyone goes out on the lawn, the teacher takes roll, and then you get the all clear to go back into the building. The weird part about this was that they took all the teachers inside first. It was funny watching all the kids trying to follow their teachers back inside the building and too see the looks of pure confusion as they were told to stay put. It's funny how well they get trained like sheep to a shepherd to follow around their teachers in these sorts of situations. I also found it entertaining that there were only 3 adults left outside after all the teachers went inside. Watching them try and control pretty much the whole school of kids was by far the best part. After awhile you could just see this huge mob headed for the door in what they called a "reverse evacuation". Why it needs such an official name I will never know.

The part that we had been wondering about all day in these drills was the lockdown drill. Growing up I had never done a lockdown drill, so I learned all sorts of new things such as, all the students have to be in the same room as the teacher, no one is allowed to leave the room under any circumstances, and you have to be out of the line of sight of any windows. This last part is what we were wondering the most about. There is only about one spot in the room that can't be seen from either of the windows and it definitely was not big enough for 60 kids to hide in. The only other option was the percussion storage room. This wasn't going to be big enough either, but once again, it was our only option. We knew there was no way all the kids were going to fit in there, but figured it would be quite entertaining to watch them try and squish in to such a small space. We even set a camera beforehand to record the chaos, but in the end we didn't do the drill due to lack of time. I was almost disappointed. My other favorite part about the lockdown drill was the explanation to the kids about the "emergency go" kit. This consisted of a 5 gallon bucket with the words emergency go written on it. They weren't thrilled about the idea of having to go to the bathroom in a bucket if there ever did happen to be a a real lockdown. But I guess you do what you have to do when it is an emergency and can't leave the classroom.