High school evacuates after bomb threat

By LPR Staff
Editor/POST-REGISTER

At 11:28 a.m. on Jan. 10, Lockhart High School joined the nation”s ranks of threatened high schools.
“We received a call to the front office, and the caller said, “You”d better be out of there by the time the bomb goes off,”” said Assistant Principal Mark Stedman.
A suspect has not been named in the terrorist threa

t at the high school on Monday. However, high school officials believe that they have pinpointed the telephone call from which the threat was made.
After the high school office received the call, the Lockhart Police Department was mobilized. The department, along with school officials, searched the stadium for any potential threats before moving the students from the school building to the stadium.
“If they really wanted to do something, that would have been the thing to do,” said Rachelle Dunkeson, a senior at Lockhart High. “If they”d wanted to really hurt us, they would have put a bomb [in the stadium] where they could get all the students at once.”
According to Stedman, once the stadium was determined to be safe, the students were relocated from their classes to the stadium, giving the police department the opportunity to search the campus building-by-building and locker-by-locker.
“Most of the students called their parents,” Stedman said. “We wouldn”t have done that unless we had determined that the threat was real. We didn”t find any sort of contraband, so we decided to resume classes.”
Although the school did not notify parents one-by-one, they spent a portion of the afternoon releasing students to their parents.
“We didn”t keep anything from the parents,” said principal Charles Red. In just over two hours, by the time the search was complete and the threat alleviated, more than one-third of the students at the high school had been released to their parents.
“Parents came to pick them up when they heard about it,” Stedman said. “Now, what we need is the support of the community. We need the parents to leave their children in place.”
He also said that truancy was a problem caused by the threat.
“We had students climbing the fence out of the stadium,” he said. “Some of them rushed the gate. Teachers tried to keep them from leaving, but they weren”t successful.”
A similar threat occurred last month at the LHS Freshman Campus, when a teacher received a voice mail message that a bomb had been left on campus.
“We take all of these threats seriously,” Stedman said. “We learned a lot about how to deal with it at the Freshman Campus. If it happens again, we”ll be even more ready. The police and the staff did a great job with getting the students relocated and the campus searched. The police were here within three minutes.”
Anyone with information about the threat should contact the police department at 398-4401 or the high school at 398-0300.