ARCADIA — Arcadia High School was placed on lockdown for more than two hours Tuesday as police investigated a threat against the campus.
After learning of the threat Tuesday morning, school officials and Arcadia police elected to seal off the campus just before noon, Arcadia police officials said.
Specifics of the threat, or how it was delivered, were not released Tuesday afternoon due to the ongoing investigation, Lt. Bob Anderson said.
The nature of the threat, we’re not releasing that at this time,” he said. “We’re certainly looking into it as a credible threat. In a situation like this, the safety of our students is our number one priority.”
Arcadia High School junior Nadia Saleh, 16, said she was in class when an alarm indicating a campus lockdown sounded.
“We all thought it was a drill, until the teacher checked outside,” she said.
Once it became the incident was not a false alarm, teachers began carrying out lockdown procedures, students said.
Students were told to line up against a wall, teachers covered over classroom windows to prevent someone outside the classroom from peering in, and shut off the lights.
Police searched the school with bomb-sniffing dogs, Saleh said.
Parents exchanges phone calls and text messages with their children during the lockdown, as they waited outside the school for their release.
Jannell Garkow of Arcadia traded texts with her 16-year-old daughter, a sophomore at the school.
“I’m a little nervous,” she said as she waited for news. “Once they start getting them out of the classrooms, I’ll be OK.”
Garkow added that her daughter was not panicked during the incident, which took place just before students were to take their lunch break.
“Her main concern is she’s starving,” Garkow said.
Renee Carrigan has two sons in the school, though only one of them, a freshman, attended Tuesday.
She said she was worried at first, but as the day progressed without word of a major incident, she began to relax.
“Odds are, you think, it’s a prank, but you can’t know for sure,” she said.
The roughly 5,000 students at the school were released shortly after 2 p.m.
Students who walk home were released to the Duarte Road side of the campus, Arcadia Unified School District spokeswoman Marilyn Daleo said. Students needing to be picked up were advised to meet their parents at nearby Arcadia County Park.
Betty Saleh of Arcadia said as a parent, she was pleased with the way the situation was handled by the school.
“They kept us calm and kept us informed,” she said.
School officials sent automated phone messages regarding the incident, and Arcadia police sent messages via the online messaging service Nixle.com.
After school activities were cancelled Tuesday, but a normal school day and activities were planned for Wednesday, Daleo said.
“Our established and practiced procedures were followed,” she said. “Everyone did what they were supposed to do, and we feel the students were safe and sound and supervised at all times.”