Texting Heightened Lockdown Fears at Montville High

At first, Courtney Rail said, she wasn’t too scared.

The 16-year-old was in Life Management class with her regular preschool group when the announcement came over the public address system.

She, the kids, the other students and the teacher got into a supply closet, as they had practiced. As they were supposed to do.

And Courtney thought, OK. It’s probably a drill.

Then she realized it was not a drill.

And, she said, “I was a little scared.”

Then the texting started.

JOCEYLN KELLEY, who turned 16 on Wednesday, was walking back to class from the library when the announcement came over.

She ducked into the nearest classroom, and fell silent there, with the other students and the teacher.

“I wasn’t scared at first,” she said.

And then the texting started.

• Bomb scare
• Gun in school
• It’s not a bomb threat it’s a stabbing
• The SWAT Team is at the school
• Police are at the school with dogs (this was true)
• There’s a kid with three guns
• A couple of people got arrested
• A couple of people got shot
• There would be a shooting just after 11 o clock during the first lunch wave in the cafeteria

ON TWITTER, on Facebook, on texts from phone to phone, the rumors flew, raising the heat, pumping calm to fear and fear to near-panic.

At the police department, the phone rang again and again and again. Parents, receiving frightened texts from their kids, called the school, called the school department, and then drove to the high school.

“We had known it was happening,” said Danielle Butgzy, Jocelyn’s mom, who has a friend in a neighboring police department. He couldn’t tell her anything other than that police were investigating.

Then she got a text from Jocelyn, saying “This is real.”

Her husband went to the school, then her brother went to the school, and then she went.

The story was repeated all over town.

CELL PHONES are allowed in Montville High School if, essentially, they don’t disrupt class.

Administrators say the phones can be helpful. They can be used as learning tools, and they can be used to disperse information in an emergency.

“We saw it as long ago as Columbine,” Superintendent Pamela Aubin said on Wednesday. But “the rumor mill is so immediate,” she said, that it can be hard to draw the line.

Montville High School Principal Chad Ellis said that he had heard and seen many of the rumors and the hype, all over Facebook, all over Twitter.

“Everybody is making stuff up,” he said.
“I love the potential for social media, but I hate the use of it,” he said.

AUBIN SAID that while the lockdown was in progress, she and others in the superintendent’s office were looking to the Montville Patch on their cell phones for information.

Others were looking to Facebook.

On the Montville Patch Facebook page, some suggested that maybe it was time to install metal detectors in the schools.

Here are some of the comments:

Christopher Delicato: Seriously, kids n guns in school...time to put aside the rights being violated and have metal detectors and searches as kids enter the schools now. Just like airport and courthouse security… Really it's the only smart safe alternative since there's so much parental neglect that spawns a child to bring a gun to school. I'm all for it. I hope the kid and the parents both face punishment

Vicky Adams: Montville is one of the only school with out them I hope it doesn't come to that

Kristin Stergio: It obviously has come to that, I would rather my kids get searched than shot

What do you think? Should metal detectors be installed in the schools?

And then there was this comment, on the main Montville Patch story:

I am also a student there. I am a freshman and was in algebra class when this happened. One of my friends and I were very frightened but mainly for the safety of others because we felt we were completely safe thanks to the help of the staff and the protocol for these situations. Yes there was a rumor that the threat was to have a shooting during first lunch. There were also rumors that shots were fired and even that three guns were found in a students locker. However, the second two are not true and the first cannot be proven as of yet. In my knowledge no one has gotten arrested and only one student was taken out for questioning. I do not believe that people were going around the school taking phones because this was a SERIOUS SITUATION but I know that my teacher allowed us to use our phones (if we had them on us) to text our parents and let them know that we were okay. It was very stressful and many people did cry afterwards during lunches as did I, because of how shocking the situation was. A lot of people were scared, but otherwise nothing went wrong.