Bomb Threat Empties School Five Days After Blast, Sacajawea Students Sent Home Again

School administrators sent anxious Sacajawea Middle School students hurrying home after a bomb threat Wednesday, just five days after an explosive blew out windows at the South Hill school.

No bomb was discovered Wednesday and school officials expected classes to resume today.

Students were told to leave the building Wednesday afternoon without stopping at lockers, then go home immediately and call their parents. Some milled about the parking lot, curious to see if a bomb was found.

“This is the second time in a week for us, and it’s getting really old,” said Kathleen Alexander, who drove by with her 14-year-old daughter, Laura.

“If they find a bomb, I’m pulling her,” Alexander said. “She’s out of school the rest of the year.”

School officials said they received an anonymous call at 11:29 a.m. from someone saying a bomb was in the building and staff and students had two hours to evacuate.

Children were not alerted until 12:45 p.m., after school employees had conducted a cursory search and found nothing. That’s when Principal Herb Rotchford addressed students on television monitors, telling them to go home.

“We assume it was a prank, but we weren’t willing to take that chance,” District 81 Superintendent Gary Livingston said.

School buses had been called in the meantime and were waiting outside, Spokane School District 81 spokeswoman Terren Roloff said.

Wyatt O’Day, 14, said his teacher took roll call before releasing them, presumably to make sure all students were accounted for.

“I thought it was kind of dumb that we had to take roll again,” O’Day said.

“If a bomb had gone off, we’d have been in there taking roll.”

After Friday’s blast, District 81 officials asked journalists not to confront students with cameras.

On Wednesday, a cluster of boys with skateboards roamed the parking lot, talking with one news reporter after another. They hadn’t gone home yet and instead returned in hopes of being interviewed, O’Day said.

Other students rushed home and called talk radio hosts to offer comments.

Still others went home and discovered they couldn’t get inside. Their house keys were stashed away in backpacks inside the off-limits school lockers.

Some parents drove around the neighborhood, looking for children who hadn’t returned home.

Police declined to search the school Wednesday, saying employees familiar with the surroundings could do a better job of noticing anything out of place. “They’re the experts on what’s up there,” Spokane Police Capt. Al Odenthal said.

The decision to call off school Wednesday doesn’t mean that’s how school officials would react to future threats, Roloff said.

District 81 schools have received about a half-dozen bomb threats since the Littleton, Colo., shootings, but none of the other schools was evacuated, she said.

Students were sent home partly because tensions were already heightened from the scare on Friday.

In that case, an explosive made from carbon dioxide capsules blasted out two windows and damaged a wall. No one has been arrested, but police say the incident could be related to other minor explosions in the neighborhood.

“Ever since Littleton, we’re having to look at these things differently,” Roloff said. “We’ll look at each one individually.”

Despite assurances from Rotchford that the school was safe after Friday’s blast, 70 percent of students were absent that day.

On Wednesday afternoon, Jason Obermiller, 15, stood on the school sidewalk remembering those words. “It’s funny,” he said, “because yesterday the principal was saying it’s the safest place in Spokane.”

FALLOUT Track meet affected Sacajawea’s participation in Wednesday’s all-city track meet was formally canceled because students couldn’t get to their equipment. Students who showed up at the meet were initially told they couldn’t participate. But persistent parents hounded district officials via cell phone until permission was granted. The student athletes had no track equipment or shoes of their own, but others were happy to help them out. “I was wearing somebody’s shoes I didn’t even know,” said Sacajawea eighth-grader Frances Bresnahan, who ran the medley relay. “It’s something positive for a school when everything’s been so bad.”