At 1:28 pm, on August 15th, 2024, students, faculty, and staff were asked to evacuate to the front of Olympia High School. Everyone walked to the front of the school into the teacher parking lot and then were directed toward the football field. The reason? A report of a lingering gas-like smell in the school.
Dylan Dubon11 recalls his own experiences: “I was in my agroscience class, just doing my work, and the announcement came on. All of a sudden, [I made the assumption that it might be] propane gas in the school, and I was like, ‘Oh great.’”
The smell was reported by a teacher in the 500 building, and the staff quickly worked to move all students to the football field in a calm, orderly manner. However, with reports of lightning in the area, the student body was quickly directed to the gymnasium. There, AP World History teacher Jennifer Parm took charge of the crowd, lifting the mood with the school’s various chants typically seen at football games.
“A lot of it comes from my background with crowd control,” Parm explained. “Crowds are volatile groups, and in a situation where we don’t have a lot of information, and don’t necessarily know what’s going on, that can make people even more nervous. So, we needed something like a big team building activity, [to help everyone] understand that they were safe and things were going to be okay.”
Despite the danger of the situation, the student body was not only mature in their attentiveness to the directions of the adults, but also showed amazing school spirit. Nobody panicked, nobody froze, and everyone followed procedures perfectly. What could’ve been a catastrophic event, turned into a display of Olympia’s bravery.
Some, like Dubon, even turned the ordeal into something lighthearted by creating pins and memorabilia using the logo of the I Survived book series by Lauren Tarshis, which retells historical events and disasters from around the world throughout history.
“I’ve seen this happen to other people in other school counties before, and they just put the ‘I Survived’ template on it, so I thought of it on the spot,” Dubon explained. “It worked out pretty well, and went around the school and the county, I guess.”
To celebrate the maturity and excellence of the student body, Principal Christy Gorberg hosted a dance party as a reward during the scheduled lunch break. The event was a great success, with students from all grade levels dancing in the cafeteria.
