Alternative Reflection for 10/4/09

Life Safety Walk Through
After telling my superintendent that I had received my internship packet, she informed me that she had my first official assignment! I was to walk “Mr. Smith”, the county Life Safety Inspector though the building and answer any questions that he may have. I quickly informed her that I had no idea what he would be looking for, nor had I ever completed anything like this before. Her reply was: “There’s no better time to learn than the present!” At ten o’clock I arrived back in her office to find “Mr. Smith” late. When he arrived at 10:15 my superintendent introduced me and explained I was starting my internship and I would be completing the walk through. Our maintenance man would assist me in unlocking cabinets and doors. “Mr. Smith” explained that he doesn’t check everything on his list because, that would take weeks. He performs “spot checks” on selected items that would pose the most harm. We walked though the whole building. Here are the areas he discussed concern with:
One of our trophy cases didn’t have safety glass in it and could sever an arm if a student would be shoved into it.
In the elementary wing, posters and papers should be at least two feet from the ceiling, because fire will climb walls. Once fire gets into a drop ceiling, it spreads very fast.
In the high school wing, he noted that all classrooms should be kept locked while unattended. If a fire were to break out and a student would wander into an unattended classroom, nobody would know where that student is.
Toward the end of our walk though we met up with the superintendent. He said that this wasn’t a site violation, but he noticed that most of the classrooms had mini refrigerators in them and that removing them could cut electricity costs by 10-20%. She informed him that she had bigger fish to fry, but thanked him for his suggestion.
I asked if our school was going to be “wrote up” for these violations? “Mr. Smith” said no. He was a principal for twenty years and knew how inspections went. ??? He would make some recommendations to our superintendent and let her take it from there.
This wasn’t anything that I expected! I thought the Life Safety guy was someone we should “fear”. Not this one! I respected the way he showed concern about certain things, but then provided WHY there was a concern. He appeared intelligent and generally impressed with our school and our life safety habits.