As they streamed out of the school an hour early, Elgin High School students recalled conditions in classrooms as a gun scare caused school officials to impose a “hold in place” lockdown status for four hours Friday. No gun ultimately was found but one student was arrested.
Elgin Police Cmdr. Colin Fleury said the hold-in-place status, with no one allowed in or out and students kept in their classrooms, was declared at about 9:30 a.m. Friday after a student told another student that he had brought a gun to school.
“We located the student and he did not have a gun,” Fleury said.
According to John Heiderscheidt, the director of safety and security for Elgin School District U46, “The student said, in front of police and school personnel, that he had hidden a gun in the school ‘and you will never find it.'”
Heiderscheidt said the student later said he had been lying about the whole thing. But because of the original “hidden” remark, he said, police and school officials felt they couldn’t safely allow students and staff to begin circulating normally until the building had been searched thoroughly.
Fleury said the Elgin Police Department has no dog trained to sniff for guns, so seven search dogs were called in from five law-enforcement agencies — the Kane County Sheriff’s Office; the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the federal Transportation Safety Administration; the U.S. Marshals Service; and the Metra railroad police. Because the high school is so big and some of the dogs had to come from so far away, it took until about 1:30 p.m. to declare the building safe.
Several of the hundreds of students leaving at about 2 p.m. said they were supposed go on to eighth-period classes but most students had decided that after they had endured such an ordeal, they would simply leave.
Students Leslie Gonzalez, Leslie Collin and Melissa Munoz said they were told to stay in their French and geometry classrooms, but for quite awhile the only way that students or even their teachers could find out what was going on was by using cellphones to call their parents and look at Facebook posts.
Rather than studying the same subject for four hours straight, Gonzalez and Collin said, they watched movies and YouTube videos over the Internet.
Soon some students felt the call of nature. “We had to wait for a dean to come by and escort people to the restroom,” Gonzalez said.
As the time for lunch came and passed, U46 officials prepared hundreds of packaged “emergency meals” and passed them out to eat in the classrooms. But these drew reviews from the teens that were as negative as those for the bathroom and information arrangements.
“The lunches had frozen bread, some nasty juice, apple sauce with no spoon and peanut butter that wasn’t real peanut butter,” said Munoz.
Heiderscheidt said the meals were prepared at U46’s central kitchen based on an emergency plan that called for such meals to be assembled in case of any power failure or disaster that rendered a school’s normal kitchen unusable. “They aren’t intended to be the best quality food,” he said.
As for the bathroom breaks, Heiderscheidt said officials didn’t feel safe either leaving a classroom without a teacher or allowing students to walk the hallways unescorted, so the school staff had to coordinate escorts as well as they could.
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He said intercom announcements were used to tell students that they had to remain in place, that a search was going on, that meals would be coming, etc. And at the end, an announcement was made that they should go to their eighth-period classes. He was unsure how many students had left instead at 2 p.m.
Fleury said the teen who made the gun claim, whom he identified only as a male juvenile, probably will be charged with disorderly conduct.
“A lot of people’s lives were disrupted because of this,” Fleury said. “If he is found guilty, a judge could order him to reimburse the cost of all these police agencies investigating this.”
Heiderscheidt noted that the event also deprived a whole high school’s students and teachers of virtually a full day of class time.
Fleury said Friday’s events had no connection with an incident Thursday night when police were called to Elgin High because a student who had been banned from the school tried to attend a fashion show there.
Freelance reporter Janelle Walker contributed to this report.