Lincoln Public Schools practices emergency drills

You often hear of schools conducting fake fire drills to ensure that students and teachers know what to do.

On Wednesday, Lincoln Public Schools did a less common but very necessary mock, reunification drill.

“We’re looking at what would happen if we left a school and had to come somewhere safe. So, we could keep kids safe and in an orderly fashion reunify kids with their parents,” LPS director of security, Joseph Wright.

170 students from Irving Middle School had to be taken to Southwest because of a made up emergency.

They were separated into class rooms and awaited the arrival of their parents.

They also had to go through a thorough process to ensure the childs safety.

“They could come, go through the check out process so we could actually test the mechanics of that. The paperwork, the pacing, things like that so we could know if it will work in the future as well,” Wright said. 

This elaborate drill is one that LPS tries to do every year and are continuously learning from.

“Now that we’ve got something to build on, we have a much stronger foundation. We feel like our system is a lot stronger and now we’re able to look at the fine tuning,” Southwest High School Principal, Mike Gillotti said.

Having learned from past exercises, they were able to call Wednesdays run through a successful one.

“It’s always a success if you learn something that you can take future steps with. We feel like we can apply a lot of the things we leaned in the first drill. So, we’re doing a good job, we feel good about it,” Gillotti said.