Monday, March 19, 2007

And now, for your protection.....

Our school is scheduled for a LOCK DOWN drill this week, an activity whereby we two teachers lock our classroom door, turn off the lights, whisk our class of highly reactive, emotionally impaired six year olds to a corner of our room where we are meant to sit in absolute silence for 10 to 15 minutes... and if we don't, a team of security specialists acting as school intruders will detect our whereabouts....

It's a nightmare.

Our administrators have worked hard to get the security folks to understand the sensitive nature of our ED kids and the many other special needs kids in our building.

I'm told they agree not to bang loudly on our doors to provoke the kids into breaking the rules and screaming.

I can't wait til this is over....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good luck with the lockdown.
My school is nearby a nuclear plant and we had a "nuclear incident response" exercise a while ago. Not quite as strict as a lockdown, but having the entire student body of a middle school sit in the hallways for 2 hours was ... interesting...
Please tell us how it went.

molly_g said...

How scary for those kiddos!

If you have anxious kids, it could really set off some obessive behavior, huh?

Anonymous said...

Yuck! I hate lockdown drills!

Unfortunately, this year, we went on actual lockdown. I had to bring 7 autistic 3-5 year olds into our classroom bathroom along with myself and teaching assistant....and the kids & teachers from the class next door. We were in the tiny bathroom for nearly 2 hours. Not fun.

Hope everything goes well!