Big white buckets with jolly ranchers, tornado drills with sometimes questionable routes to safe zones, lockdown and lockout drills to protect against intruders. By now, everyone should know what the emergency plan is for most situations, and if not, they will be informed by their teachers during safety week. With these standards in place, some teachers still feel the need to have something in their classrooms to defend students.

For English teacher Brad Ficke, that something is an old 5-iron. A 5-iron that, if needed, would be able to make windows give way when hitting the black dot in the bottom corner, as well as to defend against intruders.

“I think [students] kind of think it’s funny at first,” Ficke said. “But then, it also helps them understand the reality that in an extreme circumstance, I’m going to do whatever is necessary to keep them safe and that, you know, having something like that there probably makes them understand the gravity of the situation.”

Ficke isn’t the only teacher in the school who will take extra precautions to keep students safe.

“[Social Studies teacher David Jordan] had explained to us that he has a part of a desk that is apparently removable he used to protect his students and beat intruders with,” sophomore Trenton Lopez said.

Though students feel safer with these measures, some believe television has desensitized people to the real-life effects of emergency situations, causing students to not take drills seriously.

“I don’t know if there’s something that could actually be done that you can instill in people’s brains,” senior Rachel Chang said. “I think something has to happen really close to home.”

Despite these thoughts, feeling safe at school is still important.

“With the installation of the cameras and the new policy of locking the door, I think kids, this year, are really buying into that,” Ficke said. “There doesn’t seem to be a problem. I think change takes a couple years sometimes… [safety measures have] gotten a ton better and I think kids are more aware, too.”