Bristow, school district, police preach school’s safety following threats to campus | News | #schoolsaftey

“Safety is our highest priority. I want to assure everyone that the individuals involved in the threat will have disciplinary action.”

Perales added that students who didn’t go to class on Monday and those that would miss class throughout the week would have the absence considered as a “mental health day” and that teachers are posting their assignments online.

Perales also emailed notes to the Bristow families earlier in the day reassuring them that the campus is safe and that they have plenty of resources to ensure that. The school has Brentwood police present on site all week, along with faculty and Brentwood police giving an accurate update to students as well as dispelling any rumors that arose since Thursday, and counselors and district administrators on site all week as well for support.

“Just reiterating how safe (the students) are on campus and the different safety precautions that we’re putting into place this week,” Perales said. “I felt like we needed to have everybody together to just kind of reassure each other that we are all safer together.”

Monday night’s hour-long Zoom webinar, which was recorded and is available on the school’s website, featured Perales,  Brentwood Unified School District Superintendent Dana Eaton and the district’s director of student services Kirsten Jobb, police chief Tim Herbert, school resource officer Chris Bollinger, and Sgt. Mitch Brouillette.

The webinar addressed the pair of threats against both students and teachers on the campus on Tuesday and Thursday, both threats police deemed to be unrelated to one another. 

Thursday’s threat forced the school into a lockout, not a complete lockdown, the difference of which was explained by Brouillette in the webinar.

“When a lockout is called, the teachers are responsible and it’s business as usual inside the classroom,” Brouillette explained. “They’re going to continue to teach, they’re going to lock their doors, but the campus is going to be cleared so that we can effectively search that campus as quickly as possible. 

“A lockdown is completely different. If we go into lockdown, the teachers are taught that doors are going to be locked, lights are going to be turned off, barricades are going to be built not only behind the doors, but including windows to protect students from that. We’re also training that they have the ability, if there is a threat, to evacuate.”

Bollinger, the school resource officer for the elementary and middle schools in Brentwood, explained what happened on Thursday. He said that while investigating Tuesday’s threat, another, they were made aware of a separate threat and they immediately checked the text message that came in.

“While trying to address the first one, the second one came in and we immediately checked the kid that sent the second message,” he said.

The student who sent the threatening message was marked absent from class, forcing the school into a lockout due to the school’s knowledge of the threat. Police later discovered  that he was signed out and picked up by his father during fourth period, ending the lockout. 

However, after the students got out of lockout and were on break, that’s when Bollinger says everything went crazy.

“Someone, we’re not sure, may have said there was a shooter on campus and that’s what causes all that,” Bollinger said.

Brentwood police said in a social media update on Sunday morning that the student alleged to be responsible for Thursday’s threat was arrested and booked into juvenile hall. The student’s identity has not been released because the suspect is a minor. Eaton explained that while expulsion is the likely scenario, that they have to let the investigation play itself out.

“Expulsion is what we have available to us as a school district and looking at the students involved and holding them accountable,” he said. “We consider what took place extremely serious. We want to hold these students accountable for what they did, and in order to do that, we need to make sure that we have a clean investigation and that we’re following due process as we go forward.”

Eaton added that the students involved are off campus and that they won’t be back on while the investigation is active.