The Chicago Sun-Times
Copyright 2006 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
If you falsely yell “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater, causing people to storm out and possibly suffer injury, there’s a good chance you’ll be brought up on charges. Endangering the common good in such a manner is against the law. But if you’re a high school student who falsely pulls a fire alarm in a city school, causing an evacuation and a potentially tragic misuse of Fire Department services, there’s little chance your school will punish you for the felony with anything more than a suspension.
At least that’s the way it’s been in Chicago. Fire alarms in public high schools rose dramatically, up 25 percent during the past school year, according to records Sun-Times reporters Rosalind Rossi and Art Golab obtained from the city’s 911 center under a Freedom of Information Act request. A disturbingly large percentage of those alarms were pranks, sometimes staged to pre-empt tests -- and create an opportunity to cheat on them -- and sometimes to facilitate fights outside school doors. At Chicago Vocational Career Academy, where there has been an epidemic of false alarms, one incident led to the arrest of 19 students for brawling.
But according to Chicago Public Schools records, though expulsion was sought for one of four students who pulled the alarms, it was approved for only one of 10. There, in a nutshell, is why the problem has gotten so out of hand. “If a student pulls an alarm, that student can and should be expelled,” said CPS CEO Arne Duncan. He promised that as part of a concerted effort to deal with these students with the proper severity, principals will be urged to kick them out of school. That’s something schools should have been doing all along.
Students have more than the disruption of classes to be concerned about. “It’s dangerous,” said one of a group of concerned civics students at Chicago Vocational who initiated a fire alarm awareness campaign after conducting a survey on the problem in their school and community. “Kids could bring weapons in from the outside. We could let someone in the school that we don’t even know.” Some students use the evacuations as an excuse not to return to school, choosing instead to go places where they can get into other kinds of trouble.
Administrators have begun taking steps to better monitor and report on the false alarms, which have been grossly underreported in some cases. The measures include the use of security cameras near the fire alarms, applying fluorescent dye that will show up on the hands of illicit alarm pullers and offering rewards for reporting on them. Morgan Park High School achieved a major reduction in false alarms by just getting teachers to agree to stand near the alarms when students were passing in halls between classes. Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest.