After the front office’s pipes burst at the senior high on the morning of Jan. 17, the students at the high school may have expected that they wouldn’t have to go through what the upperclassmen did. But they would have been wrong.
At the beginning of eighth block the fire alarms went off, causing students and faculty to evacuate Carroll High and relocate to Durham Intermediate School.
“The process was super confusing in my opinion,” junior Anshika Solleti said. “It happened during the passing period and I was coming from the senior high so I didn’t know what was happening.”
According to Solleti, students coming from the senior high were just told to walk to Durham without explanation.
The students and teachers were finally informed that the school had received a bomb threat from the anti-bullying form called StopIt. When the bell rang for students to go home, the high school students were still stuck at Durham.
A system was put in place for the best way students could safely reach their homes. Many buses had gathered at Durham to take all the students who rode the bus to their homes as usual. Meanwhile, parents who were picking their high schoolers up had to wait in line to sign them out in the 30-degree weather. Because of this, pickup took much longer than it usually would. Also, parking was very hard to find because of the mass amount of parents who had to wait in line to sign their children out. This caused a rapid increase in traffic. The line of parents waiting wrapped around almost the whole school. It would take most parents a minimum of 40 minutes just to get in line.
Adding to this stress and tiredness, students had left all their belongings in their classes.
“A lot of people left their backpacks in the school which was a big problem because we couldn’t get them back until 5:30,” sophomore Zoha Askari said.
After the students went home, Carroll ISD sent an email that said that students could pick up their stuff at CHS from 5-7 p.m.
Some students had gone through the evacuation that occurred that morning on the senior high campus as well as the one that afternoon.
“I was kind of annoyed since I had to also evacuate the senior high that day,” freshman Shameen Mushtaq said.
