The school held a two-hour emergency evacuation drill on March 19 to prepare for potential natural or human-caused disasters. On this designated closed-campus day, all students and faculty had to leave the building and assemble on the football field under the hot sun.

Despite detailed instructions, some problems with the drill included miscommunications about directions. “On the day of the drill, I thought we were having an earthquake drill instead of a fire drill,” registry and science teacher Shawn Laureyns said. “But somehow that got changed, so I was confused.”

The Lowell Emergency Planning Committee, which included assistant principal of administration Michael Yi — who is in charge of buildings and grounds tasks — was formed to plan the drill.

A packet given to faculty members provided instructions on evacuating the building and lining up on the football field according to registry. Reg teachers had been instructed to fill out attendance slips to be given to designated station leaders. The station leaders used the slips to count missing students.

After teachers assessed reg-based attendance, they had to find random students — whose names were on a specific list — to check that students could be efficiently found if there had been a real emergency.

Some reg teachers were not present for the drill. According to Yi, out of the 18 faculty members recorded as absent for the day, 11 of them were registry teachers. This led to further confusion, especially for the students. “Lack of my teacher just added to the chaos and confusion and didn’t make my time any easier,” junior Joel Lee said.