In the first three months of the 2025-26 school year, there have been 14 fire alarms at Berkeley High School — 12 of which have not been emergencies. Due to the concerning rise in false fire alarms, Principal Juan Raygoza and his administration team have modified some fire alarm procedures, while still staying in bounds of state laws. The most notable change is that, during a temporary change ending in mid-November, some fire alarms across the school no longer set off their sirens across the hallways, and were instead routed to security guards on diligent firewatch.
Firewatch is the process of patrolling for fire hazards. Berkeley Unified School District went through a process where they found faulty alarms not triggered by true emergencies, and assigned fire-watchers to patrol the area in which the faulty alarm was silenced. “We go through a process where we have to work with all of our partners to say when we’re turning off the alarms, and we have to have a contracted person or a staff member whose sole job is firewatch. So if alarms are silenced in any way, there is someone whose only job … is to look for fires,” BHS Vice Principal Keldon Clegg said, “We’re not ignoring alarms or not doing things with them. That’s illegal, even though most of our staff and a number of parents have asked us to do that.”
“Faulty sensors and system calibration issues” are the main causes of these school-wide distrubances, Raygoza wrote in an email to BHS teachers on Nov. 4, 2025. BHS relies on the company Simplex for fire detection, as do other California schools.
However, due to the sheer size of BHS, diligent maintenance is required — something Simplex and technicians with expertise have failed to provide. Simplex’s unavailability, faulty calibration systems, and vaping students are all factors that have led to these unwarranted disturbances.
With numerous teachers, students, and parents voicing their concerns on the issue in school board meetings and directly to school administration, the repercussions of these fire alarms have been impactful. They also cast a heavy burden over students at BHS. “I’m disturbed by the fact that (fire alarms) really mess up our lesson plans, and a lot of the time it can turn into homework for the student,” Delphine Wadlund, a BHS junior, said. Wadlund also shared a personal account of when fire alarms affected her teacher’s classroom environment. “I’ve had two fire alarms during test days and it’s really frustrating to not see my true score reflected,” Wadlund said. Anna Shim, a math teacher at BHS, said, “It’s interrupted class time so much, losing so much instruction time. Not disrupting just one class, but multiple classes in a day. It gets too hectic.”
To maintain transparency, BHS administration made it extremely clear that were not ignoring alarms to any extent. Firewatch is a legal, state-approved procedure that BHS and other schools have been using for many years in cases of faulty alarms. The regulations are clear and require immediate evacuation of all educational facilities in the case of a fire alarm, regardless of its supposed accuracy. However, California schools are not required to have an actual alarm “sound,” but rather to “voice instructions and alert and/or evacuation signals pertaining to fire emergencies,” as outlined by the California Division of the State Architect (DSA).
Firewatch “can work on multiple levels. It might be that there is a single alarm off in one place, and firewatch is happening in that space. It can also be that we turn off all of the alarms and have firewatch across campus, the whole perimeter. That’s just really hard for us to do because there’s so much space to cover,” Clegg said.
Although firewatch successfully prevents false alarms while maintaining safety for students, its shortcomings are ever present in an administration that has recently been subjected to budget cuts at district and state levels. “It’s really expensive, we have to pay someone whose sole job is to watch (for fires) and we’re in budget cutting, so there’s really not a lot (of money) there,” Clegg said. Fire-watchers can cost anywhere from forty dollars to upwards of one hundred dollars an hour, a burdensome toll on the administration’s budget. These fire-watchers require specific trained expertise and state-approved certificates for fire safety. Additionally, fire-watchers are not labor-effective either. In one instance, a firewatch occurred in an area in the Jacket Gym. Previously, the alarm in the Jacket Gym was triggered by a valve in the overhead pipes of the gym that had caused numerous false alarms. “If it was silenced as an alarm, that’s still a lot of territory to cover, because you have to get back of the gym, front of the gym, all the way around the gym itself, the two bathrooms. So even if it sounds like one, it’s still a lot of area and space,” Clegg stated. Due to the sheer number of alarms and the magnitude of the BHS campus, implementing firewatchers all year round is not a tangible solution to false alarms.
The firewatch period ceased in mid-November, 2025, and all alarm systems are back on. Since then, no alarms occurred for 34 days, until the alarm on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. BHS has maintained fire alarm updates and transparency with staff through these hectic times of false alarms. “I’m really thankful that Principal Juan Raygoza is being really clear with his communication. He clearly expressed disappointment in the amount of fire alarms and addressed ways to eliminate them. I appreciate his honesty with the staff,” Shim said.