With outside threats always being a possibility, lockdown drills are essential to keeping students safe throughout the school year. When these safety precautions come to a stop, it becomes a concern to not only students and parents, but also the teachers and the Head of School.

   Head of School Sara Rubinstien had to decide to continue with the lockdown drills this year or not. She spoke to Director of Security Ann Quagliana. “She and I discussed the relative risk of the drill versus talking through the procedure considering the drill involves everyone huddling together in a small place, a COVID risk,” Rubinstien said. Working with the Quagliana, they were able to decide that, “describing the activity would be more effective in keeping the students safe.” Quagliana said that “since we do train every year, we also felt students could carry their experience from last year and share with new peers.” They both feel that this is the safest way for the time being. But Rubinstein is confident that “we will resume the live drills as soon as the COVID transmission risk is lower.” 

    Quagliana said that “we were hoping by the New Year that this would all be gone and we were going to have a lockdown drill and a weather drill.” Because this has not happened, she feels this is “very serious” and that “teachers need to review with their students about what you need to do.” 

    Although we couldn’t do the physical drills, Quagliana says she had prior planned for “the active threat training which was scheduled for August, but because of COVID we cancelled it, so what I did to keep everybody safe is I did bring in a speaker. The speaker addressed the entire school, faculty and staff.” Quagliana said that she was glad that she was able to do something about the drills even if it was only “two days of presentations.”