Well ... THAT would certainly be interesting. Thank goodness the fire marshall is young, so unless he leaves for another job somewhere, we'll hopefully keep him around!
I really appreciate all of your help and replies - they've given me some good ammo. for when our security and fire control folks come tomorrow.
Sam - I completely agree with your suggestion to have everything going through the Simplex system. I know the reason it's not that way though. Way back when, when there was smoke in the building, the detectors detected it, and set the horns off on the Simplex system. Problem with that was that it was a day in which there was no school, the building was closed up and locked, and at that time, there was no monitoring involved. The alarms were going off for almost 15 minutes it turned out before someone by accident had to go over to the school, and discovered that the fire horns were on!

The reason that the relay panel was installed was to allow the Ademco sirens to sound as well. We have an external siren mounted on the outside of the building, and that will get folks' attention if there's a problem. Thus, the reason why we did that.
I agree - it's not a good solution, but for now, it's working. It's all going to be redone in the not-too-distant future, so then we can have some state-of-the-art stuff put in - well, at least better than what we have now!
I did a walk-around today and counted 5 smokes that were not flashing at 10-second intervals. All the smokes are the same model in the school, and several of them were flashing, so I'm assuming that the ones which were not are totally not functioning at all. In your opinion, do you think that this would be from the water damage that happened up on the second floor? Is it possible that water coming through the ceiling might have shorted out some of the wiring, or is that not plausible? Just wondering if the roofer's insurance can take care of this, or if this would be something that we're responsible. I'm a man of integrity, so I don't want to make the roofing guys pay for more damages than they need to - they've learned an expensive lesson already.
You guys are terrific - hope I can contribute something on this, or another forum here in the future.
I'll post back and let you know what we found out at least - so there'll be some kind of ending!
Take care,
Michael/AdemcoWisc