The Potential Fire-Alarm Issue at Twin Oaks

Author: Mathias Silva

What’ll happen to the students of Hayward Twin Oaks when we mistake a real emergency with “another prank”?

I started attending this school 3 years ago. In that time I can recall how there was almost always a fire alarm pulled every 2 months (not counting drills). It's gotten to the point where whenever there's a fire alarm and everyone's told “Do not grab your belongings” around half the students just ignore that request because historically every alarm has been false. This obviously causes some safety concerns that I don't believe I have to go into in great detail.

Most students (like myself) have been led to believe that the cause of these are people pulling them as a prank or to simply get out of a test. However, we have yet to get any information about the fire alarms at community meetings yet. If it's because people are falsely pulling the fire alarms, why has there not been any discouragement of it in community meetings? And if it had to do with faulty alarms, it’d be a serious safety concern for everyone.

I feel like the school needs to share info with the students regarding incidents more often as this isn't limited to fire alarms. Last year, we had a lockdown due to (apparently) an unhoused individual trying to get into our school; however, a lot of students immediately thought of a worse case scenario. To put it simply, this school needs to be more transparent with the students as some of these issues could potentially lead to safety concerns.