Columbus schools Downtown headquarters lack fire alarm, sprinklers

View Larger Education Blog Education databases Helpful Links Local Stories from ThisWeek More Articles By Bill Bush The Columbus Dispatch Monday September 22, 2014 6:02 AM

Standing-room-only crowds at times pack its basement meeting room, and file cabinets housing paper records stretch from wall to wall across its upper floors.

But the Downtown headquarters building of Columbus City Schools doesnt have a basic fire alarm that would sound in an emergency or notify the fire department of a blaze in the middle of the night, a district internal audit noted recently. It also has no fire-suppressing sprinkler system.

The reason? They werent required by city building code or the state fire code at the time of the buildings construction.

Its not required to have an alarming system in it, due to the date it was constructed and under the type of the occupancy it is, which is a business-code occupancy, said Battalion Chief Tracy Smith, spokeswoman for the Columbus Fire Division. It is Ohio Revised Code compliant.

The building has a 150-person assembly permit for school-board meetings, Smith said. A fire alarm is required for public assemblies of 300 people or more, she said.

From the fire department aspect, we would love to have every single building in the city of Columbus with an alarm system and sprinkler system, but the law doesnt require it, Smith said.

The three-story, 28,200-square-foot building was constructed in 1960, and its meeting room is often filled to capacity, with the crowd spilling into the hallways.

A district internal audit into the practices of the personnel department reported last month that paper records covering thousands of district employees could be destroyed in a fire because of the lack of an alarm and sprinkler system. The records arent backed up off-site, the audit said.

The personnel department, housed on the first floor of the building, responded to the audit this school year by storing all documents for newly hired employees electronically, allowing them to be backed up off-site. It is looking into scanning older documents into electronic files so they, too, can be backed up off-site.

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Columbus schools Downtown headquarters lack fire alarm, sprinklers