A group of middle school students in Montgomery County, Maryland, shared their ideas and suggestions on how to help disabled students and teachers during emergency evacuations.
The six students are part of a Montgomery County FIRST LEGO League Team called Nuts and Bolts. The league designs and programs LEGO Mindstorm robots to solve real-world problems. The group opted to help children and staff be safely evacuated from schools in the event of an emergency. Ayush Dave, a student at Rocky Hill Middle School in Clarksburg, realised it was a problem when there was a fire emergency in his school last year.
While evacuating, I noticed that one girl who was in a wheelchair waited in an area of refuge while everyone else evacuated,” he told the school board at a meeting last week. The students researched the school’s policy on emergencies and discovered the girl was doing exactly what Montgomery County Public Schools policy required. The policy urges students unable to safely evacuate alone to wait on an upper floor inside the building until a fire department official arrives to facilitate the evacuation because there isn’t equipment in place for school employees to do so.
The students came prepared with a few potential solutions, including an award-winning device they invented.“We invented a zip line that runs inside a school or hospital stairway and allows swift, safe evacuation of multiple people with mobility disabilities,” said Raunak Banerjee, a Cabin John Middle School student.
