- FARIBAULT, Minn. - The fire
alarm screams through the halls of Faribault's Roosevelt Elementary, but
no one is leaving.
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- Students instead stay in their rooms while teachers check
the halls and a custodian checks an electronic panel that pinpoints where
in the school the alarm was pulled. It's a drill, but one that goes as
planned. Principal Joel Timmerman tells everyone over the intercom to look
around.
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- "If there's no smoke," he announces, "please
stay where you are."
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- Fire alarms send people for the exits automatically in
nearly every school in the nation. But Roosevelt and four other Minnesota
schools are experimenting with "staged evacuation," which keeps
kids in the building unless there is smoke or other obvious danger signs.
The belief is that children may be safer inside modern buildings than facing
potential threats beyond the schoolhouse door.
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- Principals using staged evacuation (also called "defend-in-place")
say it keeps order better. At Southwest and North high schools in Minneapolis,
principals say it has slashed the number of false alarms.
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- Firefighters, however, are divided on how safe it is.
Minnesota's fire marshal and Faribault's fire chief back it, but the head
of the state's professional firefighters group doesn't.
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- "The one concept we can't lose sight of is: If you
hear the alarm, get out," said Mike Stockstead, president of the Minnesota
Professional Firefighters Association, whose members serve 176 Minnesota
communities. "What they are telling those kids to do is 'Sit in your
seat and await further instruction.' It's absolutely wrong."
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- Stockstead, who witnessed a staged-evacuation drill at
Faribault High School, said schools aren't running staged evacuations in
line with national standards. He also said it's dangerous to send children,
especially young ones, a message about how to respond to a school alarm
that's different from what they're told to do at home or in other buildings.
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- A FEW TESTS
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- Minneapolis and Faribault schools have been testing the
practice for two years with little fanfare. Minnesota codes now being adopted
will let schools with sprinkler systems and other safety designs use this
kind of school emergency plan, said Jon Nisja of the state fire marshal's
office. Prior codes insisted on total evacuation.
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- Data from the fire marshal's office suggests most schools
won't go this route because of the expense of installing sprinklers, installing
a system that identifies where the alarm was pulled, and other requirements.
Among the benefits listed by the marshal's office: Staffers pay attention
to the alarm, the alarm is less disruptive to teaching, and false alarms
are less frequent.
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- Southwest High began using it the 2000-01 school year
after suffering 48 nondrill evacuations the prior school year. "It's
a terrible loss of instructional time," said Principal Dawn Allan,
who also noted that some students use an evacuation as a convenient way
to wander away.
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- False alarm-pulls fell dramatically to "maybe five"
the first year of using a defend-in-place plan, she added, and fewer than
a dozen families in the first year called with concerns.
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- Allan noted that in other schools in the country, fire
alarms have been pulled as a means to violence. "We can't guarantee
the safety of our students nearly as well on the sidewalks and the streets
than we can when they're in the building," she said.
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- Roosevelt is the only elementary school experimenting
with staged evacuation. On a cold, wet September day, students and staffers
were no doubt grateful to be indoors. The drill included an evacuation
of the third- and fourth-grade wing. The children moved to the gym, where
in a real fire they would be protected by the steel fire doors installed
in walls that extend to the roof, officials said. The building is fairly
new and modern in its fireproofing design.
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- "It's so much better than sending them outside,"
Timmerman said. "We may be putting them more in harm's way pushing
them out of the building." The school holds nine drills a year, as
state law requires, and also practices full evacuations and lockdowns.
Timmerman said he'd put in his own kids at Roosevelt without worry. The
wings and classrooms also have separate exits, and teachers can evacuate
their kids outside if needed.
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- CONCERNS AND SUPPORT
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- Teachers have been willing to experiment with the emergency
plan but still worry about the confusion it might cause young learners.
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- "There are a lot of teachers who do have concerns,
real concerns, that (students) are going to get mixed messages," third-grade
teacher Bonnie Becker said as she returned her children to their classrooms
after the drill. Would they know that they need to get out if they were
in the town library or at home when the alarm went off? she wondered. "It's
hard to know what's in a kid's mind."
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- Educators have been teaching the differences, and there
are clear benefits to the school, she added: It's more organized, and "we
spend far less time on a fire drill than we used to." Still, she didn't
know whether most teachers in the school supported staged evacuation.
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- Mike Monge, head of the Faribault Fire Department, is
"100 percent" for it in schools that have sprinkler systems and
other firefighting updates. Hospitals, nursing homes, jails and other buildings
use staged evacuation, he said " "they don't automatically evacuate
everyone out of Regions Hospital when the alarm rings." He and others
also pointed out that students who shot at middle-school classmates in
1998 in Jonesboro, Ark., pulled the alarm so students would come streaming
out.
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- Stockstead said Jonesboro was an anomaly that doesn't
justify such a major change in evacuation policy. He said debate on defend-in-place
has been inadequate, and he noted perhaps the most powerful argument for
the status quo: In 50 years of requiring students to evacuate when they
hear the alarm, no Minnesota student has died by fire in a school.
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- It's a sentiment echoed by Kenneth Trump, president of
National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting
firm.
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- "I would have reservations" about staged evacuation
in schools, he said. There are other ways to combat false alarms, he said,
and "it's only going to take one incident where you have a kid killed
in a school because of a fire and people didn't evacuate."
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- Monge said he hopes to see staged evacuation at other
Faribault schools. At its heart, he said, it simply means that a school
sizes up a situation and finds out what's going on before acting, just
like firefighters do when they arrive on a scene. "With all the changes
in technology and fire protection," he said, "it's time to change
the way we react."
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- HOW STAGED EVACUATION WORKS
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- When the fire alarm rings in most Minnesota schools,
the reaction is the same: File out of the building immediately. Five schools
are experimenting with a plan called "staged evacuation" or "defend-in-place"
that keeps students in the school if there are no obvious signs of danger.
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- At Roosevelt Elementary in Faribault, instead of an immediate
evacuation at the alarm, they go through this process:
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- Check fire alarm panel and have staff members respond
immediately to the area where the alarm has been pulled.
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- The principal announces over the intercom that the alarm
has been pulled, staff is checking and that teachers and students should
listen for instructions and be prepared to evacuate if necessary.
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- If the person checking the location of the alarm indicates
no problem, an announcement is made that there is no fire and that all
activities may continue.
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- If there is a fire, decide what part of the school should
be evacuated and announce it over the intercom. Tell the evacuated staff
and students exactly where you want to meet " in another part of the
building or in the parking lot. Tell others over the intercom to listen
for further instructions.
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- Assign someone to meet with evacuated staff to make sure
everyone is accounted for and have someone meet the fire department and
tell them if someone is missing. Contact central office if there is a fire.
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- -- Paul Tosto covers K-12 education. Reach him at ptosto@pioneerpress.com
or (651) 228-2119.
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- http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/4167040.htm
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- Comment
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- From Jeff Flaker
- 9-30-2
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- Jeff - I have been a volunteer firefighter for close
to 15 years as well as my father and brother and have seen my share of
fire and fire related deaths.
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- "Defend in place" may have some merit on paper,
but it is a time bomb and WILL blow up in someone's red face.
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- The small (1.2sq mile) town I started as a volunteer
firefighter had pull box stations about every 3-4 blocks (About 55 all
together) for fire/police/ems. However, the kids in town started overly
abusing the system by pulling the box and running.after about 2 years of
6-10 false calls per week, the town installed a telephone call system in
place of the pull boxes, though reducing the false alarm calls, the kids
in town still found a way of calling in the false alarms.
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- The police (Fire department is dispatched by the police
in my hometown) took the stance of send a police patrol unit first, and
if needed, the fire department later.
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- This stance was opposed by the fire chief, but put into
place anyway and led to the death of a 26 year old mother and her 2 year
old child. The fire chief at that point DEMANDED that there be immediate
response of fire apparatus, even to the point of calling out the fire department
FIRST before giving the call to the patrol.
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- In my opinion, this school system is putting the children
into an unsafe environmenteven if a death in the school doesn't happen,
they are teaching/conditioning these children in the WRONG response during
a fire alarmwhether in the home or elsewhere outside of school. If the
parents had any kind of sense, they would put an end to this teaching/conditioning.
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- A VERY Concerned Firefighter in New Jersey!
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