Despite lockdown, Minneapolis high school was pretty calm on Wednesday

By Sinthia Mireya Turcios

Yesterday there was a lockdown at all Minneapolis public schools and at Cretin-Derham Hall High School in St. Paul. School officials later reported that someone in Australia sent a message claiming that a man would shoot up a Minneapolis school. Sinthia Turcios, a Washburn student and member of ThreeSixty’s editorial board, sent this report.

At Washburn we found out about the Code Yellow ten minutes before first period ended. The principal spoke calmly to everyone saying that the school was safe, but didn’t give any further information. Teachers reacted right away by locking their doors and explaining what a Code Yellow was to the students.

I was in Robotics when this happened and the students didn’t know exactly what was going so no one took it seriously. As second hour was beginning, rumors were already being passed around by students. Parents texted students since the school district had called them to tell them about the situation. Of course, they texted their kids to see if something had really happened. But it wasn’t just parents texting students. Students who had friends at other schools in the district texted each other to figure out what was going on.

It seemed that everyone outside the school knew more than we did. Before lunch time there was an announcement informing juniors and seniors that they wouldn’t be able to go off campus for lunch time. During lunch time, cops were guarding the doors.

During fourth hour our teacher said it wasn’t true that Washburn in particular had been threatened, a rumor some students heard. During the whole day students weren’t allowed to leave classes no matter the situation except if a police officer escorted them.

Not a lot of students were worried about this. Mostly everyone thought of this as some dumb person in the web or wherever trying to get everyone scared. A lot of my friends tried convincing their parents to go pick them up because they were too scared to stay in the school.

But the lockdown didn’t affect the way classes worked, except that the students had a lot of unanswered questions. At the end of the day there were different policemen than the usual ones, ones wearing khaki pants and SWAT type jackets. But still there weren’t a lot of policemen so it didn’t seem like much of a big deal.