Shots, chaos tested LCHS mettle

LYNN – Months of planning and practice drills were intended to prepare students and faculty for a time like this, but it was not until the shell casings hit the ground outside of Lynn Classical High School Friday afternoon that the reality of the situation truly set in.Parents were picking up students from Breed Middle School and Classical High School in a busy area of West Lynn just after 2:30 p.m. when shots rang out of a speeding red SUV, sending the usually calm neighborhood into a panic.Students and faculty inside of the schools rushed into lockdown mode, where they remained for over an hour, huddling together in crowded classrooms, unsure if the source of the banging on doors and lockers outside was from police, or a crazed gunman out for blood.Luckily for everyone involved, the alleged gang members who had fired .9-millimeter bullets at their rivals that afternoon had fled the area and, in the end, everyone in and around the school escaped injury.”Some of the kids were hiding under tables or sitting in the corner,” junior Socrates Trinidad told The Item after the incident on Friday. “We were all pretty nervous and scared.”This type of incident is what the Lynn School Department has been preparing for alongside School Safety and Security Liaison Officer Robert Ferrari.The shots were fired on the corner of O’Callaghan Way and Holyoke Street, in close proximity to three schools, Classical, Breed and the Julia Callahan Elementary School – all of which were forced into lockdown during the commotion.While the Callahan School was mostly empty, students remained at Breed and Classical after school for various reasons.Hiding under desks and text-messaging parents with updates, students were nervous, but as Superintendent Nicholas Kostan pointed out, all involved handled the situation flawlessly.”We are very, very pleased with how the students and the staff responded to the situation at Classical High School last week,” Kostan said. “This really validated the need for training in that area throughout the district and we are pleased with how things went procedurally.”Classical Principal Warren White, who was not at the school when the lockdown took place, said the extensive training involved in the lockdown procedure assured that everyone was on the same page, and proved that being prepared for a violent incident is essential in this day and age.”You can stick your head in the sand say, ‘We don’t need these procedures, people will know what to do,’ or hand out a manual and hope everybody responds, but the fact of the matter is that in this day and age it is not a question of if, but a question of when,” he said. “I think the Lynn Public Schools and this system deserve some accolades because all of our people were prepared for this. We have these procedures in place hoping that we never have to use them, but when we had to use them the people responded and did it right.”White said that everything was back to normal at Classical Monday, and that he and his staff met before and after school to discuss what went right and what went wrong during the lockdown. He also communicated with students via loudspeaker and school television to praise their efforts on Friday.”Just like when we go through the training and we meet with (Ferrari) afterward to discuss what went right and what didn’t, we had a voluntary staff meeting to talk about the situation (Monday),” he said. “Things change, but we have gone through that training and we have a command team in place.”