WARREN, Mich. (WXYZ) — On Monday morning, a technical glitch led to a lockdown response at Warren Mott High School. Students, parents and even some teachers thought the alarms were real and say they are traumatized.
Around 8:50 a.m., an alarm went over the speaker system to the approximately 1,500 students and 100 staff members at Warren Mott High that stating: "Attention staff and students, this building is in a lockdown, teachers lock your doors immediately.”
The school's ALICE response kicked in and students like junior Allison Bigger texted their parents and loved ones messages of confusion and fear.
“I was texting my mom, I was texting my friends thinking like oh my God, this is actually happening. I might not be alive at the end of the day," Bigger said. “My whole body was shaking."
Bigger says her teacher locked the door and armed himself with a golf club. Later, he opened the door and told students to run as far as they could. Some students were picked up by school buses and taken to safe zones like a Target parking lot.
Others who couldn't make the bus ran across 12 Mile Road to the fire station, another school or simply ran home.
"It seemed like nobody knew what was going on. It was just really chaotic," parent Christina Suliman said.
Suliman picked her child up from school not understanding the threat.
Warren Consolidated Schools Superintendent John Bernia says the alarm went off accidentally. The district is currently updating their alarm and panic systems and there was a glitch.
"We are currently in the process of doing some upgrades to that technology to make it even more responsive, and so what happened this morning is the old system and the new system had a miscommunication," Bernia said. "We knew it was a false alarm. We had reported it to the Warren Police Department, and we were reporting that to our school and to our staff as quickly as we could. But as you can appreciate, these things happened kind of quickly."
While the district knew it was a false alarm the entire time, parents like Melissa Gordon did not and raced to the school after receiving text messages from her two children at the high school. Her mind went to the Oxford High School shooting from 2021 and the Georgia school shooting that happened just days ago.
“We still had no idea what was going on. We didn’t know if it was an active shooter situation, what the threat was — we didn’t know," she said. “For eight hours a day, you have to communicate with us — someway, somehow. If you can send a text message at 5 o’clock in the morning that we have a snow day, text us and let us know that our kids are OK.”
While the district was communicating on their social media, parents only received a phone call two hours after the alarm. Some students left school. Those who remained were told to return to class.
"When you're at a building of 1,500 students and you're evacuating that building in the environment that we're in, coming off the heels of a school shooting last weekend at a high school in Georgia, folks were afraid and and I understand why," Bernia said. "I'm really sorry that this happened and caused so much strife for people. I feel terrible."
Bernia later sent out a letter to parents explaining the situation and offering counseling services at the school for the remainder of the week.
But some parents say if this was a real situation, the way it was handled was flawed. Due to the trauma, some parents are considering removing their children from the school.
“It’s just a very scary and traumatic situation," Suliman said.
Bernia says he will be meeting with staff to go over the incident at length.
