Students and staff are back in classes after swatting threats prompted a lockdown at Palo Alto High School on Tuesday morning.
The school-wide lockdown was initially announced at 11:34 a.m., with a follow-up announcement lifting the shelter-in-place at 11:50 a.m.
According to an X post from the Palo Alto Police Department, officers were on scene at both Paly and Gunn High School to investigate threats to both school campuses.
Assistant Principal Jerry Berkson said a similar lockdown occurred at Gunn two minutes before the order to lockdown at Paly.
“We got a call from a violence hotline that informed us that someone had mentioned in a chat that they were going to commit violence at our school,” Berkson said. “Coincidentally or not, I had heard two minutes prior that Gunn was on lockdown.”
Berkson said that the school administration decided to issue the lockdown order after the police arrived.
“I called the district office to ask if we should be on lockdown,” Berkson said. “They said to hold off until they get more information. I went outside when the police were there, and they said ‘Go ahead and lock down.’”
According to Berkson, this threat of criminally deceiving police officers is called ‘swatting.’
“It’s happening all over the country,” Berkson said. “There’s different types of swatting, but this was in a chat room. My guess is a lot of different schools were mentioned across the country in this chat room.”
Jasmine Kwak, sophomore, said that the Paly students in the library taking the American Mathematical Competition and the lockdown interruption was a shock.
“Everybody seemed really confused on what to do,” Kwak said. “[We] were all kind of glancing around the room and looking at each other for five minutes before we moved and did anything.”
English teacher Richard Rodriguez said he felt that the situation was handled well.
“It’s sad that we have to go through that [lockdown], but it was very important that we were prepared,” Rodriguez said. “I felt that administration did a good job of keeping us up to date and getting into procedure quickly.”
Additional reporting by Motoko Iwata and Nathan Jiang.
