Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Fire alarms at school shake MSD students
Nine alarms in a month bring back day of terror for kids; ‘I want to hide’
PARKLAND – Any loud noise will do it, but the wail of a fire alarm is one of the worst. It leaves Maddie Zeltwanger in terror. And the alarms keep happening.
“I start hyperventilating,” said Zeltwanger, a sophomore who watched three of her classmates die Feb. 14 in her English class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. “I just want to hide.”
Zeltwanger and many of her classmates have relived that horrible day over and over during a string of unplanned fire alarms this school year.
At least nine alarms have gone off since school started Aug. 15; only three had been planned. On some days, it’s been two in one day, the same pattern as the day when a 19-year-old former student gunned down 17 people in the halls and classrooms of Stoneman Douglas.
The first alarm that day was a planned drill in the
morning. The second was set off in the afternoon by smoke from the gunman’s AR-15 rifle.
This year, two fire drills and one “Code Red” drill were planned, according to Broward schools spokeswoman Tracy Clark.
As for the other times, a special-needs student is believed to have pulled the alarm three times, according to Principal Ty Thompson. Others went off in a teacher planning area or due to faulty wiring, Clark said.
Whatever the cause, the alarms have destroyed the sense of normalcy that Broward officials had hoped to instill this school year. When the alarms go off, some students and teachers look for places to hide. Some jump to protect people nearby. Some break into tears, even when, within minutes, they learn that it was a false alarm.
Many parents have grown frustrated and angry. Parent Fred Guttenberg got a text Wednesday from his son, Jesse, about an alarm that day.
Jesse had escaped the carnage at the high school Feb. 14 as he frantically tried to reach his little sister, Jaime, 14. She died after she was shot in the back on the third floor of the freshman building.
There’s a fire alarm going off again, Jesse texted to his father on Wednesday. “I’m done!”
“I said ‘Are you OK to stay,’ ” Guttenberg said, and as he typed the alarm went off again.
Guttenberg drove to the school to fetch his son, a 17-year-old senior who was shaking.
“Feb. 14 started for him with a fire alarm, that’s how it started. When the fire alarms go off that’s what it brings back for him,” Fred Guttenberg said.
Thompson, the principal, showed his frustration in a voicemail he left for Douglas families.
“If you think for one minute that I am OK with this, you are mistaken,” Thompson said in a message Tuesday. “I care deeply for all 3,300 students and my 250 staff members, and every time that alarm goes off, I am pained at having to get on the PA to give reassurances.
“This is not fun by any means. I am well aware how this affects the population I serve, and please know this hurts me just as much as your child and my staff members.”
Thompson said the school’s special-needs staff could be punished if they did not supervise their students. He asked parents to email state officials about getting a waiver for Douglas to be relieved of at least some required Code Red drills.
Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie said the district has been working with Coral Springs fire officials to resolve the malfunctions.
Meanwhile, fear continues for staff and students. Their reaction is not unusual when people experience the same stimuli that triggered a trauma, said Jessica Ruiz, chief psychologist at Behavioral Health Associates of Broward, Counseling Centers of the Goodman Jewish Family Services. She has worked with several Douglas families and teachers since the shootings.
“Their bodies might start to react the same way they acted at the moment,” Ruiz said. “Alarms, popping sounds, loud doors. For them, it’s like it’s happening again and they go into survival mode.”
Ruiz said some students have demonstrated resilience through activism, a way to deal with their sadness. But many in the community, including teachers, first responders and students’ families, are still healing, she said.
Among them is geometry teacher Kim Krawczyk. She was on the third floor when the shootings took place.
Krawczyk has found her throat closes up and she starts to sweat when the alarms go off.
“The first alarm, I was so panicked I ran to the door and stood in front of it and looked to see where I could put my kids. I knew in my head somewhere that it wasn’t going to be the same thing, but it still brought back so many feelings and all I could think of was how am I going to keep these kids safe,” she said.
“The last time I experienced two fire drills in one day, we had left the safety of our room to navigate a hallway that had been the scene of a massacre.”
Sarah Stricker, now a 15-year-old sophomore, was supposed to be in study hall on the second floor of the freshman building that day, but she popped into a classroom on the first floor to chat with her Spanish teacher.
When shooter Nikolas Cruz’s rampage began and the bullets started flying, the students around her cowered in fear, behind the teacher’s desk, trying to hide behind a filing cabinet, slammed against the wall, trying to disappear into it. With no place to go, a friend of hers sat on her legs. They heard Cruz try the door handle, but the door was locked.
Then shots exploded into the classroom as the glass window blew out.
The fire alarm went off, but bullets were popping, so Stricker and the students in that room were trapped.
They tried to stay quiet, and they could hear screaming from outside their room. Nobody in Classroom 1215 was shot, but students in nearby rooms and trapped in the hallway weren’t as lucky.
The shrieking of the fire alarms today sends Sarah back into a dark place that she fought so hard all summer to overcome.
On Tuesday, she was in history class, right around the time the massacre at Douglas began seven months ago, when the alarm went off — “the worst timing ever.”
On Wednesday, two alarms in a row went off, and she had had enough. Her father picked her up early.
Her nerves were frayed the next day and she just stayed home.
“I’m just afraid it’s going to go off again, and I never know if it’s going to be real or not,” she said. “Whenever I hear it, it makes me think of what happened every time. It’s the same alarm.”
When the alarms have finished, “I feel like my heart is in my stomach. I don’t feel anything, I get so scared.”