This week, Manhattan High’s West Campus will be putting on an annual safety week.

“… our district makes a safety week for each school where they focus on emergency responses ranging from a secure campus, lockdowns, fire drills, severe weather drills and sometimes to include an evacuation of a school sight to a separate location,” assistant principal, Michael Dorst said.

By practicing these drills, students can transport themselves and others to a safer, separate location where they can quickly respond to an event in the most appropriate matter.

These drills aren’t just made for students, but for it’s for Manhattan High as a whole.

“The purpose of safety week isn’t just important to the students, really to our entire environment including all of the adults, and even to the parents of our students,” Dorst said.

Participating in safety week helps students respond to a particular event, such as if there was a short warning time for a tornado. The school should know how to immediately transport to a safer and secure environment.

“It provides us a way to practice how we would respond in an event… We really are trying to shift it from practicing for a drill to actually if an event of a fire actually happened,” Dorst said. “How would we do that? So the drills are there to help us simulate that response. If a real event actually happened, it’s the best way to ensure the safety of other people.”

As the school practices these safety drills, the school improves on their performance to ensure the safety of every student and staff.

“We are practicing so that everyone can handle it better. We can always improve,”  Dorst said. “When you look back to times in our nation’s history, when we did not practice drills like this, there is actually data on this, for loss of life. … If we practice those events, and we see areas we can improve, and we improve on those areas, when a real event happens we have a better chance for people to be safely evacuated or sheltering and have less either injuries or prevent the loss of life.”

In order to save lives, the school is training others to prevent all injuries.

“We are trying to train everybody in the building, of not told what to do but how to react,” Dorst said. “The school is trying to get you to think, if there’s something in your path, what is your secondary plan? Where do you go next? That’s what the whole purpose of making each drill random, and training you to think rapidly, how do I save my life?”

Safety week will be completely random, with no one — not teachers or even administrators — knowing what drill will be designated on each day or even what time. This is to teach students what they need to do to stay safe during an event.

“If we can begin to train everybody that comes here, or works here to think that way then as they go through different points in their life, they can have that skill set,” Dorst said. “it can possibly save their life later on, down the road,”