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Boston Latin Academy put into safe mode after parent calls to report a kid's inside with a gun, only it turned out to be a Nerf gun and the school had already confiscated it
By adamg on Fri, 01/12/2024 - 2:42pm
Screen captures from one parent's phone of the message parents got.
Police ordered Boston Latin Academy into "safe" mode early this afternoon after a parent reported her daughter had just called her to tell her another student was inside the school with a gun.
Students were told to stay in their classrooms as police rushed a K9 unit and a "gun car" - stocked with rifles and battering rams and manned by specially trained officers - rushed to the scene.
"It's being treated as an active shooter situation," another parent told Universal Hub. "Students are hiding in their classrooms."
Around 2:10 p.m., police and school officials determined there was no student with a gun inside. A student had brought a Nerf gun - a cartoon-like plastic gizmo for shooting foam projectiles - but it had already been confiscated.
A police commander gave the OK for officers to begin to leave - keeping some behind to handle traffic on Townsend Street and nearby Humboldt Avenue.
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Comments
It was not treated as an active shooter drill
School was not put into lockdown. Kids were just in classrooms and being quiet. My kid did his homework. The rumor mill went into overdrive and probably made the situation worse.
And before anyone rushes to criticize them going into safe mode over a nerf gun, hindsight is 20-20 and unfortunately you have to treat each incident like it could be something serious, because the impact of not taking it seriously could be many dead kids & teachers
"you have to treat each
"you have to treat each incident like it could be something serious,"
Disagree. There's no rule that you "have" to overreact just-because. It's discretionary.
Define "overreact"
... without doing so in hindsight.
Want to react properly? Make it fucking hard to get a mass murder machine.
My kid's teacher did treat it
My kid's teacher did treat it as an active shooter situation. The students huddled in a corner of the classroom and the teacher stood between them and the door prepared to beat the intruder with a textbook.
Clarification needed
Did the parent call the school or did the parent call BPS?
I don't know what the protocol is here but if there was communication between BPS and the school officials at the start of a response, did none of the school officials know the nerf gun had already been already confiscated? Or did they think the call was something separate from the nerf gun?
I agree with others that it is better to not assume anything given that there are too many guns and its too easy to get them and bullets. At the same time, going into lockdown (including "safe mode") is traumatizing. I wonder what other breakdowns in communication might have made this worse than it needed to be (besides the parent understanding that there was a real gun at the school).
Or did the parent call the
Or did the parent call the police? Since there are 2 kids with the same name, sounds like the 2nd kid had a nerf gun taken away? Was the other one questioned?
https://twitter.com/BostonAreaAlert/status/1745885931976942058
This school's administration has had communication issues in the past.
Thank you for finding my typo
I meant to write BPD. Damn D and S are right next to each other on the keyboard and I clearly needed more coffee when I wrote that comment.
Sadly (or not), I got kicked off of Twitter (the new owner doesn't like the kind of stuff I was tweeting about) so I'm unable to read the link. I assume it suggests that there are communication problems on each side.