Sunday, December 6, 2009

Fires in the bathroom?

I am a student at Calhoun High School, in Merrick New York. This past few weeks, there have been several fires in the girls bathroom and the school is on high alert to weed out the supposed "arsonist." Though the fire poses a serious threat to the safety of the school , its the administration and faculty that are the biggest threat to the students survival.
According to News 12 broadcast on the situation, there have been at least 6 fires in our school so far and we were only evacuated for two of the six. Even though the fires have been nothing but a "smokey paper incident", according to Mr. Seinfeld, principle of Calhoun High School. However, if some kind of catastrophic incident happened, many students could be injured or dead because of the inadequacy of Calhoun's evacuation procedures.
Even during fire drills, the school has failed to meet the criteria to pull off a safe and successful procedure. I wouldn't be surprised of the Board of Education forces Calhoun to go through fire safety training and procedures.
Another concern is how the situation is being handled. The first announcement about the fire was made to put fear into the arsonists eyes to try to scare he or she from making anymore fires. The second announcement entailed force, anger and dictatorship over the girls bathrooms. They would be supervised at all times and girls have to sign in every time they use the bathroom. Obviously the third time the person set the fire, supervision was not being used on the bathrooms in the B wing. The third announcement was a plead, and a sort of beg to stop the fires. I think Mr.Seinfeld was trying to go for the guilt aspect. I find it interesting that since it is a girl who is thought to be lighting the fires, the administration is going crazy. If it was a boy, things would be taken more lightly and they would have thought, "Oh its just boys being boys." But since its a girl, they think she is a deranged and dangerous arsonist. It just goes to show how differently and unequally women are treated in our fucked up society.

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