Reports of Burroughs High administrators' response to a fire alarm on campus this week were nothing short of, well, alarming.
When the alarm went off shortly before 11:15 a.m. on Monday, students were told to stay put, that it was a false alarm.
Fifteen minutes later, the alarm was still going off and students were evacuated when it was discovered that it was not a false alarm. There was an electrical fire under the auditorium.
Fortunately, Burbank Fire doused the blaze and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that no one was hurt.
But the question remains: What were administrators thinking?
Why weren't those students evacuated right away?
What happened to what we were all taught about fire drills? The alarm sounds, everyone gets up and walks outside, in an orderly fashion, to a place safely away from danger.
These fire alarms need to be taken seriously.
It may be that students trigger most of the fire alarms at Burroughs, as the district's facilities chief says, but that's no excuse for not acting when the initial alarm sounds.
The moral of the story about the boy who cried wolf is that we should not ignore the cry. There are two lessons to be taken from it.
One is for the students pulling the alarm. You have apparently desensitized your teachers and administrators to the point where your lives may be at risk. Stop pulling the alarm. It is there for a real emergency.
Lesson two is for those administrators. It doesn't matter how often the alarm is false. It is still an indicator of a potentially life-threatening situation and must always be taken seriously.
District facilities chief Craig Jellison stressed that the district takes such alarms seriously. School officials respond quickly to alarms and they aren't disregarded, he said.
That didn't seem to be the case on Monday.
Monday's events beg some questions about how fire alarms — and emergencies, in general — are dealt with at local campuses, where thousands of lives have to be moved around and managed.
And what about the aftermath of the incident, as students waited on the athletic fields as administrators figured the situation out?
It's odd that the superintendent of the district would praise students for their patience in Monday's incident but then say that those very students' cellphone calls to parents about the fire caused more confusion.
It's as if the students had no reason to call home and say, "Hey, mom, dad, there was a fire at school."
Parents and children should have the peace of mind of knowing that emergencies at their schools are dealt with in a way that quickly moves students out of harm's way. Monday should be a wake-up call that things could be better.
Parents shouldn't be left to say, as one did about Monday's response to the alarm: "It wasn't right at all."
