Alarms were recently put on door 17, the ‘baseball doors’, adjacent to the west parking lot at Westside High School on Wednesday, Feb. 26 and Thursday, Feb. 27. On Wednesday morning, during Mod 1, an email was sent out by Assistant Principal Tola Dada informing all students about the new alarms. Dean of Students Jordan Rhodes says the reason they did this is for the same reason they put alarms on the auditorium doors during the 2018-19 school year: safety of students and faculty.

“[We are putting alarms on the baseball doors] because [administration] wants to streamline the traffic of people entering and leaving the building so it goes through as many common doors as possible; we can only monitor so many doors at once,” Rhodes said. “We want to make sure [Westside High School] is safe, and one of the best ways to do that is to keep people that want to cause problems out.”

According to Rhodes, these alarms are solely for safety and not a petty message directed to students. He said that he wants to make sure that all students go home safely at the end of the day.

“If you’re a person [who is not a student or employed at Westside High School] trying to get into the school, you’re probably going to look for doors that are not [supervised] by security,” Rhodes said. “If all of the doors around the building are locked, the only way for you to get in would be when somebody is coming out, because that’s when the doors open.”

According to Rhodes, if there are students exiting out of doors that are unsupervised, that is a weak point for an intruder to get into the school. Rhodes said that there have been instances where high schoolers that do not attend Westside have gotten into the school and they do so by entering through doors that are not supervised by a hall supervisor. Rhodes further stresses the idea that these new alarms have no correlation with being stubborn or petty towards students. Similar to Rhodes, Hall Supervisor Rose Kent said that placing alarms on doors that aren’t monitored is a good way to keep intruders out of the building.

“We’ve had a case or two where a student has unknowingly let an intruder into the school,” Kent said. “[We didn’t have to go into lockdown], but the cameras picked up who let the intruder in and who the intruder was.”