On December 6th 2013, BSGE had their first lockdown drill. BSGE, along with many other schools, decided to implement these drills in order to prepare for emergencies during which intruders, such as armed gunmen, trespass onto school premises. On the 6th, Ms. Johnson announced over the loud-speaker, “We are now in soft lockdown.” This signaled that students and teachers were supposed to go to the part of the room where someone in the hallways could not see them. To further protect the class, safety shields were put up over the glass windows on the door in order to prevent the intruder from seeing into the windows on the doors. During soft lockdown, all the classroom doors and exterior building doors are locked. Any visitors at BSGE are asked to state who they are and the nature of their business when they are buzzed into a building. Contrastingly, in a hard lockdown, all outsiders are not allowed to enter the school, and people are not allowed out.
Schools practice the lockdown drill mainly because of news of school shootings. A very recent case was in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. On December 14, 2012 twenty children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary by 20-year-old Adam Lanza. The gunman had killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, in their Sandy Hook home earlier that day. It was the second deadliest mass shooting in United States history, only behind the Virginia Tech mass shooting in April of 2007. This was both very serious and alarming to the schools of America and around the world.
