On Mon., Dec. 9, the fire alarm went off near the end of C lunch, which ends at 12:34 PM. Students evacuated the building and were called back in shortly after there was no immediate threat detected. For the remainder of the school day, the incident, according to administration, was under investigation. 

“It was not a scheduled drill. We actually had a student that made a poor decision and pulled the fire alarm,” McIntosh’s School Resource Officer Thomas Conover said. 

This alarm caused a disruption to the entire school day.

“It has an effect on the entire school, everybody that’s in here, all the teachers, all the students, all the faculty, staff, custodians, everybody. It completely shuts down the school for a period of time. It’s something that we definitely take very serious,” Conover said.

Some students wondered why the fire department did not respond to the call, and Conover explained why. 

“I went to the [alarm] box with [Assistant Principal Leon] Hammond to see where the alarm came from, because it has a sensor that tells us which alarm was pulled and where it was at. So once I located [where it] was, I saw it was actually pulled, so I know it wasn’t something that was an actual fire. So with that happening, I was able to get on my radio and call, because we had actually two officers en route and [firefighters] en route, and I was able to get a hold of them and cancel them before they got here,” Conover said. 

Conover described what happens when students make decisions that have consequences of this magnitude. 

“So when we talked [to] all the students, [about] everything that happened, [and it opened] up two different investigations, the legal aspect and the school aspect. So both investigations were opened by people and consequences were given out for the poor decision,” Conover said.