“Good morning, everyone. This is Assistant Principal Ruth Jurgensen. We will now begin a lockdown drill for our entire main campus building. Please initiate lockdown procedure now.”

Assistant Principal Ruth Jurgensen’s voice echoed through the school with the eerie announcement of a lockdown drill at 10:00 on the morning of Friday, March 9, just under a month after the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida where seventeen people were killed.

The shooting occasioned special attempts to inform the community. Principal Dan Frank sent out an email on February 28 to teachers and parents certifying that safety measures were being taken to guard against school shootings. “Because school safety is a paramount concern, Parker works closely with a security consultant, the police and fire departments, and we practice many different kinds of safety drills,” Frank’s email said. “As importantly, we also speak to our students, teachers and staff about how we all can help support a culture of safety on our campus and in our relationships with one another.”

Jurgensen sent out a separate email Thursday March 8 detailing what a real lockdown would look like, and what to do in the event of a fire alarm coinciding with the lockdown tone.  The school shooter in Parkland pulled the fire alarm, the senior senator from Florida Bill Nelson told CNN, in an effort to prompt “kids to come pouring out of the classrooms and into the hall.”

Parker’s lockdown tone, a blaring, alternating pitch, played for the entirety of the drill two Fridays ago as students and teachers crouched behind desks. Anyone in the building was told to remain silent and out of view of the door.  

This uptick in safety communication is a result of the Parkland shootings. “On the 9th we were supposed to be doing a tornado drill. But I’m not worried about a tornado,” Jurgensen said. “And I’m not worried about an active shooter either, but I think Parkland emphasized the need to be uber prepared.”

This is an effect that Chicago Police Department Officer Dunne overseeing the recent Parker lockdown drill has seen throughout the city.

“I would say in the last couple of weeks since the incident in Florida, it appears from all the phone calls I’m getting from principals in neighborhood schools, it’s becoming in higher demand,” Dunne said, “and a lot of the principals are saying, ‘We should be doing more lockdown drills and less fire drills.’” In recent months in Chicago the fire department has done more fire drills than the CPD has done lockdown drills, according to the officer.

Parker reaches out to the CPD to conduct its drills. “Basically what we do is we come in and lock it down, and then we walk floor by floor, hallway by hallway, room by room, bathroom by bathroom, to make sure that there’s nobody at risk in the event that an active shooter were to gain entry,” Dunne said. “Everything here was perfect today.”

Jurgensen also highlights the impact the shooting had on building better relationships with the 18th precinct. “As a result of Parkland, we were able to engage with the 18th precinct,” Jurgensen said. The 18th precinct is the one in which Parker resides. “Officer Dunne has been to the school every day since. She provided information to the precinct for the walkout. They arranged to have uniformed officers with us. The school’s security consultant has come in, and he’s happy with what we’re doing, the precinct is happy with what we’re doing. Officers don’t want to see things like Parkland happening.”

A full ten minutes after it started, the tone cut out, and Jurgensen’s voice resumed on the speaker, directing students to their classrooms or advisories for attendance to be taken.

Students were more on edge about the proceedings. “It was just all more real today after what happened in Parkland, Florida,” senior Zoë Gardner said. “I mean, we’ve always known that it could happen to us, and I knew it was a drill, but somehow this still really freaked me out.”

Schools are only required by law to do a lockdown drill once a year, and this is Parker’s first for the 2017-2018 school year. The CPD officer on campus said she tries to do the drills two or three times a year with each school.

“We’re always open, you just gotta reach out to us,” Dunne said.  “We could do a lockdown drill every day, every week, every month–whatever the school feels they want to do to make sure in the event that an incident were to happen everyone knows the routine.”