Let’s start at the beginning
Today was the retreat for juniors in full IB. Since I am not in full IB, this was looking to be a pretty easy day. I was one of the first people to arrive to my fifth block Psych class (it’s around 11:15). Our teacher was gone and, according to the substitute, had nothing planned for class. I sat down and started talking to some friends.
Ten minutes into class, I overhear someone else say the word “gunshot”. Naturally, I’m curious and I ask what she’s talking about. She tells me that during passing period a backpack was dropped off the balcony and a loud “pop” was heard. Some people thought it was a balloon or a bag or chips but others argued it was too loud for that. Overall, we were confused. It seemed that if a gun really had gone off we would be in lock-down. Several people left class and came back reporting several officers by the main office. Something was up.
Then someone’s cell rang. He listened for a moment and then told us
"It’s my mom, she just received an alert saying a gun went off at school."
As you can imagine, this was a surprise. We had all thought that if a gun really had gone off we would be the first to know. Not long after we noticed several local news stations had reported the incident, but there was still no word to the students.
After lunch it is made painfully clear that a lot of people are still totally in the dark about what happened, so I start to tweet everything I know.
It was confirmed through several teachers that they were told not to say anything about it. A friend of mine, who teaches at another school, told me that they are legally obligated not to.
At this point I also linked to several other news reports on the subject. They all said pretty much what we had pieced together from our eye witness account. A gun went off and they had arrested someone. There wasn’t a lot of information out there but the fact is that they released it to the public before they released it to us. At the time, I was more understanding than I am now.
It was clear they wanted classes to resume as normal and they did. Or at least they resumed as normal as they can with rumors flying left and right. As one student put it:
At this point nothing new was really coming in. We couldn’t tune into the news conference and none of the websites provided any updates. Nearly two hours had passed since the gun went off and there had still been no announcement.
Finally at around 1:30, they released an official statement. It was obviously being read and we would find out only a few minutes where it was being read from.
This letter bothered me. There was no new information, I had already learned this through eye witness accounts and parent info. My dad even emailed me the message he had got after it happened.
So why did they wait two hours to let us in the loop? And if they were waiting for more information then why was anyone informed at all?
At the end of the day I was told that several people had been called down to the office an told to delete their tweets on the subject. Presumably this was too get rid of any speculation but at this point I don’t even know.
And if we ever do find out what exactly happened, it seems we’ll be the last to know.
