Close the blinds, lock the door, turn off the lights, and sit against the wall. That’s the procedure if an intruder enters campus. Lockdowns are familiar to any student or faculty member at the School, with drills being a bimonthly occurrence.
As gun violence continues to be a concern for schools nationwide, lockdowns and drills to practice for lockdowns are parts of life at the School. On July 24th, an intruder entered the School’s campus, prompting a lockdown for those who were on campus at the time. Police caught the intruder after around an hour and a half, and the lockdown ended.
“We went into a lockdown…because we saw someone jump over the fence,” said Ana Gomez, Director of Operations at the School. The person who saw the intruder jump over the fence told someone else, who then made an announcement over the public address system. Gomez said, “I heard [the announcement] and at that point that’s when I thought ‘I have to turn on the Ruvna.’” Ruvna is the School’s system for keeping track of people on campus in case of an emergency. Staff and faculty are supposed to mark themselves and the students or groups they are responsible for as safe and accounted for on the Ruvna app, allowing the School to track where people are during an emergency.
In the situation over the summer, the announcement over the public address system alerted Kor Shin, Associate Director of College Counseling, to the emergency. Shin was on campus meeting with students online when they heard the announcement and went into lockdown. Shin said, “It was definitely scary. It was helpful that information was being shared [on Ruvna]… It was helpful to hear I was not here alone.” Shin was locked in their room for 90 minutes while police searched for the intruder.
Gomez gave the police maps of campus and relayed information between the police and those on lockdown. Shin said, “It also was helpful to feel like I could be productive in some way… I was in communication with the Director of Operations, Ana Gomez, being like ‘Hey, I’m hearing things in my area.’”
“I could hear what sounded like police… there was a code word that was sent to us that we were supposed to tell to police so that police would know we were employees here, so as they opened the door, I said the code word,” Shin said.
Sabrine Sarandah, a senior at the School, was on campus that day for a tennis practice. Sarandah said, “After 10-15 minutes of being on campus, I got a call from my mom, she was like ‘you need to leave.’” Sarandah was then told by staff to hide in a shed by the tennis courts. She then got a call from a tennis team-mate who was on campus, with a police sergeant on the line, who told her not to go down to the gym.
Faculty and Staff have to switch from being on the school-year Ruvna system to the summer Ruvna system. If they didn’t, they would not get notifications, and the school wouldn’t know they were on campus, according to Gomez. She said that the lockdown showed her that there needs to be more communication with staff in the future, around telling them to switch systems.
According to a poll of 91 students, faculty, and staff members, 55% of respondents had an overall positive view of lockdown procedures at the School, with around 15% more students feeling neutral about the lockdown procedures. One anonymous respondent said, “The way Head Royce does drills is far superior than any school I’ve attended.”