Of all the days to leave my phone in my locker
Posted by Mr. Sheehy on April 25, 2007
I was sitting in my desk, waiting for the bell to ring and class to begin. It’s not uncommon to have a lockdown or fire drill because it seems like we are practicing them all the time. So when Mr. Jones came on the intercom and said we need to go into lockdown, I didn’t think much of it. It seemed strange because in the hallway everyone was rushing to class. I don’t know why but I wasn’t scared at all, even when we were told a gun was sighted. The teacher shut off the lights and locked the door. Some people took out their ipod and the teacher announced that we could have our cell phones out too. I found out afterwards, that in many classes kids weren’t allowed to use their cell phones. I think that it ridiculous because that is the only way that parents could know what was going on and not freak out. I always have my cell phone with me. In fact, I’m always the person getting caught with it. But it just so happens I left it in my locker that day. How perfect. So, while everyone was texting and receiving pictures of the swat team, I could only watch and get mad at myself for not bringing it to class.
Over the intercom, the principal told the teachers to check their email for information on what was going on. I asked my teacher what it said but he wouldn’t tell us because usually we aren’t supposed to know that stuff. Of course, we were told shortly after that. You can’t expect 2,000 students to cooperate when we have no idea what’s going on. After about 5 minutes, they made an announcement that someone had been sighted with a gun but he had fled the school. We were told that the police were called but we had no idea, until later, how big of a deal this was. We turned on the news but turned the volume down really low. They were interviewing one of the cops and showing footage of the swat team surrounding the school. It seemed that we were really safe because there were people everywhere and rumors of snipers on the roofs near by.
Speaking of rumors, there was a ton. It was impossible to know what was going on because half the information we got was false. We heard there were shots at an elementary school, that the science department had been taken hostage, and that they had found the person with the gun. All of this turned out to be false. You could only trust what we were told over the intercom but they only gave announcements about every hour. On the news, they said that parents could go to a near by grocery store to get more information. I wasn’t sure if my parents would know where to go when they found out what was going on so I called my dad with a friend’s phone. He sounded worried so I told him that we were ok but I didn’t really know much more than him. My friend and I moved across the room to sit with other people. We were all really calm and no one seemed to be afraid at all.
Using the computers in the room, we went to the journal’s site and read the articles that were posted about the current situation. There is a place that you can leave comments, so we did. We thought it would be interesting for readers to see the perspective of the students inside the school. When I looked at the site after the lock down, there were nearly 100 comments. Everyone else had the same idea as we did. It was kind of weird to see that all of the cover stories were about the lockdown and Virginia Tech. It’s pretty sad that that’s all there is to talk about!
After about 2 hours the principal made an announcement that, room-by-room, people would be coming to escort us across the street to the civic center. It took forever for them to get to us! We were the one of the last departments to be evacuated so we had to wait another one and a half hours to leave. In that time we talked a lot and just hung out. Later we found out the whole thing was a hoax. There were mixed feelings about this because some people were happy that we got to miss school, others were mad that they had been so scared, and yet some people, like me, were just angry about how long we had to sit there bored. It was a crazy experience that was actually kind of fun but I definitely don’t want it to happen again.
-Kenzie
