Unfiltered Story #257794

It’s summer, and the preschool I work at offers summer camps to students. I agree to work in the afternoons. I come into work one day and I’m told that there will be a fire drill at one. This is when we usually clean up lunch and put the students down for a nap, but we decide to take them outside to play for a little bit until the drill is over. The morning teachers agree to stay a little late to help with crowd control, especially since one of the students is autistic.

We rush the students through lunch so we can get them to the playground at twelve forty-five. It’s drizzling but the kids don’t seem to care. Twenty minutes later, some of the kids are starting to get tired. Others hate being wet. Two have to go potty. We assure them that we will go inside as soon as the fire drill is over. Another fifteen minutes pass and the alarm still hasn’t sounded. The preschool director is trying to text the fire marshall to find out the cause of the delay, but she isn’t getting anywhere. She tells us that at one thirty, we will go inside.

At one twenty-seven, the alarm finally goes off. The alarm is painfully loud when you’re inside the building, and we can clearly hear it out on the playground. Once it stops, we line the kids up and go inside. The autistic student goes with the other afternoon teacher to nap separately since he can be really loud and will keep everyone else up. I get the other kids settled down quickly. The morning teachers leave.

Ten minutes later, everyone is laying down and quiet (though not necessarily asleep), except for one kid who is in the bathroom attached to our room, and I’m getting settled with my ebook when the alarm goes off again. Like I said before, it is painfully loud. Everyone, me included, covers their ears. I turn the lights on and five kids want me to pick them up. I run to the bathroom to check on the kid in there, and he just has the most utterly confused look ever. We can hear the autistic kid screaming from down the hall.

A minute later, it shuts off. I open the door and I can hear the preschool director yelling at the fire marshall. Her rant isn’t appropriate for small children to hear and I shut the door, but it boils down to waking up the kids when they were already cranky because we had to delay nap time because he was late.

I managed to calm everyone back down, but no one napped that day.