Recently at San Jacinto High School, there’s been a large surge of false fire alarms going off. As the alarms become more frequent and the days get hotter, both staff and students are starting to get fed up with the alarms.

“This is only like the second time in 9 years of teaching that we’ve had a situation where it was like, it was pretty obvious to everybody that like, ‘yeah, these are a bunch of false alarms,” explained Blake Douglas, an AP Chemistry teacher at SJHS.

This surge of false fire alarms have gone off in the middle of multiple classes and have ruined lessons for staff and students, and have put them behind on schedule in classes.

“I try to maintain an active classroom,” began AP Microeconomics teacher Wendy Gardner, “and so it will often disrupt whatever learning is going on and take us out to the field for an unknown length of time. So, it’s really disruptive because more than anything you can’t plan ahead.”

ASB Senior Vice President, Isaiah Garcia, said, “I remember in one instance, I was taking a test and we weren’t able to take it ‘cause there was a fire alarm. And it kinda just set us back behind another class, so it just kinda ruins things.”

With the sudden increase of false fire alarms, both staff and students have been trying to figure out what’s been driving students to set them off.

“They really just wanna pull them just for being… devious? Like, no other reason than that. Same way we had ‘devious licks.’ It’s just devious. People just want to do something bad,” explained Isaiah Garcia. 

“I think it’s mostly a culture thing of do people have something to do? Do they have somewhere to be? Do they know that this is going to have very serious repercussions for themselves personally if they get caught? And if they don’t, I would expect this kind of misbehavior to happen,” added Blake Douglas.

An important group of people who are overshadowed during the fire alarm process are the security guards who are ensuring the safety of people on campus. One of the security guards, DeSean Gilmore, gave us advice for future fire alarms.

“The fire alarm should be taken serious each time,” he began. “Falsely pulled or drill or if there’s an actual fire, no matter what, because you never know if it’s the real thing. Listen to the people who are giving instructions during fire alarms, so that we can make sure that communications are spread out throughout the campus well, and so that we can get back into our classrooms safely.”

Thankfully, we have been seeing a decrease in the false fire alarms being set off, and we hope that this decrease continues for the rest of the school year.

For Tiger Media Network, this is Estuardo Garcia and Justin Grino.