Where would you hide?

Who would you contact? 

Do you have a plan? 

Administration announced procedures in the event of an emergency during lunch, passing periods or mornings and evenings in the homeroom slides on Nov. 6. The school held a Lockdown Discussion Drill during homeroom on Nov. 7 to prepare students for the first responder Lockdown Drill in March. 

“It’s extremely dark and morbid. And in that sense it’s very difficult to talk about it,” statistics teacher Michael Harris said. “It certainly brings up a lot of trauma that we’ve seen throughout just the country, and then also brings up a lot of anxiety about what might happen.”

If students are in the cafeteria, hallways, bathrooms or outside during a fire alarm or lockdown, they must self-evacuate by exiting the building. Students should then call 911 and find a faculty member to be accounted for. Students should then call 911 and find a faculty member who can account for them.

“The [alarm] goes off, I’m out the door instantly,” junior Ethan Doulder said. “I’m not staying, peace-out. Full sprint, track shoes on, I’m gone. My parents even; they don’t want me to stay in the school. They’d rather me run out the door.”

The Lockdown Discussion Drill allowed students to learn and talk about what happens during a lockdown. Homerooms played a video and then discussed procedures in given emergencies. 

“I think Lockdowns should be practiced more commonly than one time a school year because the threat of school shootings and the potential need for a lockdown is rapidly growing,” senior Hannah Thomann said. “The natural instinct of what to do in that stressful situation might not be as clear as to what to do in the case of a fire.”

During a lockdown, students must be quiet and silence devices, avoid doors and windows, and hide as best they can. Administration advises mapping plans out and talking with peers and parents. 

“Ideally everyone wants to be a hero in those kinds of situations,” Harris said. “But most people will just go to what they’ve been trained to do, what they’ve practiced doing. So that’s why it’s important to continually think about these things and practice.”

According to U.S. News, there were 346 school shooting incidents in the country in 2023. There were 23 school shootings in Texas alone.

“We can’t feel safe in a place that we spend basically all of our time in,” Thomann said. “It’s like not feeling safe going to work every single day. We’re at school the same amount of time that you would be at a full-time job.”