Fire, bus, lockdown, and tornado drills in consecutive periods on Aug. 16 marked the first ever “Super Bowl of Safety,” a one-day, crash-course format for safety drills at Papio South. Though drills normally are spread out through the first few weeks of the school year, Principal Jeff Spilker decided that the school’s vision for its so-called “Super Bowl of Safety” would be an improved drill format.
“This year, we put them all in one day, because drills do create a disruption to learning, but they also have such importance in terms of our students’ safety and well-being,” Spilker said. “It’s really a priority to have them, and as we talked with our leadership team, our group of teachers, they shared the idea of ‘What if we did these all at once?’ We think doing them all at once will allow us to be efficient and to teach the things that are needed. Sometimes we’ll wait two or three weeks for a tornado drill, and it’s like ‘Well, what happens if a tornado happens before that?’”
The new format of safety drills also offered an opportunity for students to not only refresh their memory, but also to rank their favored drills.
According to senior Blake Gizinski, lockdown and tornado drills take a backseat to bus and fire drills.
“A bus drill, we get to jump out of a bus. A fire drill, I get to go outside. This [tornado drill], I get to listen to beeping for half an hour and sit in a hallway,” Gizinski said. He added, “I forgot about lockdowns. Lockdowns are my least favorite.”
Despite Gizinski’s lack of enjoyment in tornado and lockdown drills, he acknowledged the importance of all safety drills.
“I feel a lot safer knowing that I understand how to do these safety drills in the event that something does happen while I’m in school,” Gizinski said. “I feel like I can really handle any situation that’s thrown at me.”
For junior Talan Draft, the tornado drill stood above the others.
“It’s good, I like this one,” Draft said of the day’s tornado drill. “I’m confident I would survive the tornado.”
Even though some drills might be favored over others, Spilker said he believed the “Super Bowl of Safety” was a winning situation for all. And while Spilker likes to joke that there is a statewide safety drill power-ranking, the thing that matters most to him is preparing Titan students and staff to be safe in any emergency situation.
“We have a little bit of fun with rankings, there’s not really an official ranking,” Spilker explained. “I do believe that we are in a great position here at Papio South in terms of our safety. We always do all of our drills, every single classroom you go in has the Standard Response Protocol posted. Our teachers are great leaders, and our teachers know the protocols to follow. … [S]o we do feel very comfortable that if anything ever happened here out of our control – if we had a fire, if we had a gas leak, or if we had an intruder of some type – I really do feel comfortable that our students would follow our teachers’ lead and that we’d have the appropriate response, and that we’d be able to keep everybody safe.”
