On October 6, 2023, Novi High School was put into a shelter in place. A shelter in place is usually ordered when someone is aware of a potential threat or safety issue and notifies someone. Administrators will then evaluate the report and will notify all students and staff to take shelter that way everyone is prepared.
Administrators say they were able to improve how quickly they can get into classrooms and search bags compared to last year’s shelter in place. This year’s occurrence only took 2 hours, compared to last year’s 3 or 4.
One of the assistant principals, Ronald Kane, talks about the improvement that was made and how he felt.
“We have more staff, so we had more staff able to go into classrooms and search bags. We were able to kind of reflect on what happened last year and make some improvements, what we did and we will do the same after this one as well,” Kane said.
Kane stated that students were in their classroom or where they were supposed to be. He believes if they were not where they were supposed to be, then they touched base with those students and were able to get them in a secure location.
English teacher Peggy Bassett said that her students remained calm due to the two shelters in places that occurred last year.
“Shelter in place is not an immediate threat so I just locked my door,” Bassett said. “Students were calm, they had been through this before. Students were working on an essay, so they either continued to work on their essay or they did not.”
While Bassett’s students may have remained calm, every student reacted differently; some students may have been calm, some students may have been terrified, some may have been surprised, and some may have not been in class and wondered what was going on, or where they should go if all doors were closed and they were not in their classroom.
One student, Emily Lassen, was one of the students who was out of her classroom.
“It was scary and really stressful because nobody knew what was happening. I was filming something for my class and we had no sort of communication from teachers and it was scary because we just wanted to know what was happening” Lassen said.
Thank you to all students and staff that remained calm and helped out!
