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Thursday, Nov. 05, 2009

UPDATE: Charges filed in Howard High gun case

Two female ninth-graders at Howard High School were charged Thursday with bringing a gun to school, renewing concerns among parents about school security.

Just as school began at 7:30 a.m. Thursday, a student told her teacher that a 15-year-old female had brought a gun to school. From there, school officials responded quickly.

Howard went into immediate lockdown, meaning that students were locked in their classrooms and no one was allowed in or out of school.

Authorities said a 15-year-old student stashed the handgun in a 14-year-old female’s locker.

School officials found it wrapped in a shirt and said the gun had not been fired.

Both girls have been charged with bringing a weapon on a school campus. They are being held at the county’s youth detention center, said Bibb County school system spokesman Chris Floore.

School officials are not releasing the girls’ names or a possible motive, but they said both students have been suspended from school.

“At this time it is unknown how the (15-year-old) came into possession of the gun or what the intention was in bringing it to school,” principal Karen Yarbrough told parents in a school letter. “Our students are to be commended for coming forward with this information, and their prompt notification allowed us to act immediately.”

Thursday’s discovery marked the second time this school year that a gun has been brought to a Bibb County school by a student.

While in lockdown at Howard Thursday, several students had their cell phones inside the high school and called or sent text messages their parents.

It prompted some parents to come to the high school to pick up their children early.

“It’s shocking to have kids with loaded guns at school,” Howard High School parent Richard Broughman said while standing outside watching. “You never know what could happen.”

“It sounds like they might have to have metal detectors for kids to walk through to come to school.”

While under lockdown in her food nutrition and wellness class, student Destinee Hurst texted her mother to come and get her.

All her class was told was that someone had a gun in the building.

“It was real scary,” she said. “They should have let us know what was going on.”

Superintendent Sharon Patterson, who was at the high school during lockdown, called the situation “extremely distressing.”

Thursday, the school system had just begun its first initiative to search the county’s middle and high schools for weapons using police dogs.

A couple of police dogs were at Northeast High doing a search, but they were quickly called to Howard.

The security move came as a result of a gun incident at a Bibb County middle school about two months ago.

On Aug. 25, a 13-year-old boy at Bloomfield Middle School discharged a .38-caliber gun at school. No one was injured, and the 13-year-old was later expelled as well as sentenced to a year of confinement.

As precaution Thursday, Howard High parents were called through the school system’s emergency telephone system and notified about the gun. A notification letter was also promptly put on the high school’s Web site.

Bibb County schools reported five incidents of students caught with handguns in 2008, the latest state student incident report.

While schools use metal wands to periodically check students for drugs and weapons, there hasn’t been discussion about placing metal detectors at school doors permanently, Patterson said.

There will be frequent security searches with police dogs in the system’s middle and high schools, Patterson said.

“They will be random and regular,” she said.