I am the Vice President of our PTO in a North Carolina public elementary school and during our monthly meeting the principal asked us to pay for the fire alarm system monitoring. Come to find out, we had a small fire in the kindergarten kitchen, someone pulled the fire alarm, the sirens went off, the kids were evaluated from the building, but because we don’t have the fire alarm monitoring, the fire department wasn’t notified to respond to the incident. This lead to another issue about the confusion some teaches thinking this was a drill and then bringing their kids back into the school before the incident was officially cleared (this is another issue altogether). I found out that the last three years, the fire alarm system has not been monitored. I’m not sure who monitored it before then.
I’m trying to figure out how other North Carolina schools are paying for this. The county is paying for the security system, which I thought included the fire alarm, but come to find out not. Obviously, I do not feel that this is a PTO issue. I feel that this should be in the school’s budget, if not paid directly by the school system, or the state.
