Grand Rapids Christian Middle School Principal's Corner

Spring Safety Awareness Week

Now that the sun is out and the birds are chirping, it finally feels like spring may be arriving in Michigan. After a long winter of polar vortexes and snow days, we look forward to celebrating the change of seasons!
 
We have decided to declare this week "Spring Safety Awareness Week" at GRCMS. I wanted to give a brief overview of the drills we will do this week so that parents know, when your children come home and may describe a drill, why we are doing what we do.
 
First, as a Christian school community, we are committed to creating the most effective and safe learning environment that we can for your children. We seek to minimize distractions but, also, to be prepared in the event of an emergency. To that end, and to meet state requirements for our safety procedures-we also complete state-required drills for fires, tornados (severe weather), and lockdowns.
 
By state law, we are required to complete five fire drills, two tornado drills, and three lockdown drills per year. In order to help promote safety and to allow the students to better understand why we do these drills, we decided on this "Safety Awareness Week" in order both to highlight why we do these drills and to help to calm any anxiety students might feel about them (because the students will know we are doing multiple drills this week).
 
We have already done a tornado (severe weather) drill on Monday, and we will complete another fire and lockdown drill this week. We wanted our parents to have a heads up about this and to be informed so that you could also speak at home with your students about the reasons we do these important safety drills.

Thanks for partnering with us in the education and safety of your children!

-Eric Burgess