Norman School District Cleared after Lockdown

Staff and Wire Reports

NORMAN, Oklahoma – Students and parents in Norman spent a few hours on edge this morning as police officers surrounded schools. A threat forced officials to lock down Norman Public Schools.

A threatening chat room post and voicemail prompted Norman school officials to lock down every campus in the district.

The lockdown was precautionary. Superintendent Joe Siano says he ordered all schools locked down at 9:45 a.m. Friday with students remaining in the class they were in. The district has 15 elementary schools, four middle schools and two high schools.

Siano says the school received a voice mail Friday morning from a man who said he was in South Dakota and that there was an Internet posting threatening a "Columbine-like" attack on Norman schools. Siano says no specific school was mentioned and he did not know where on the Internet the threat was made.

"We locked down every school since it was not a specific school in the post apparently," Norman School Superintendent Dr. Joe Siano said.

Norman sent out a telephone notification to every parent in the system. Some of them came by the high school to see about taking their children home. Some did and some didn't.

"My daughter doesn't want to come home, so, I trust my vice principal and I said, OK, she can stay," parent Diane Davis.

About 90 minutes after it started, the lockdown was lifted.

"I was just bored, everyone else in my class was freaking out," said Norman High School student Jonathan Hutchens. "I was just like, OK, this is going to happen."

Nothing happened, but the superintendent thinks he made the right call.

"We certainly don't ever want to take any of these things as a prank or in any other sense," Siano said.

Columbine High School in Colorado is where two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher then themselves on April 20, 1999.