An unknown person looking in windows at Bayfield High School on Friday morning prompted schools in the district to go on “lockout” for about 20 minutes.
Bayfield Marshal Joe McIntyre said he was at BHS for a meeting when a teacher reported a male he didn’t recognize was looking in windows. The man was riding a bicycle and had a duffel bag, the teacher said.
McIntyre said he and deputies searched the neighborhood around the school and couldn’t find anyone.
“Just as a safety precaution, we decided to go into a lockout” while police and school staff were assessing the situation, McIntyre said. “It was an abundance of caution.”
“A lockout is part of our standard response protocol that communicates to our staff and students that there is a concern,” Tod Lokey, the principal at nearby Bayfield Middle School, wrote to parents in an email sent out at 10 a.m.
While school doors are locked during the day anyway, the lockout limits entrance into buildings, as well as student movement.
Within 20 minutes, “BMS was informed that the Bayfield Marshal’s Office had swept the neighborhood and they no longer felt that the man was going to enter district property,” Lokey wrote. “At that time, I called an ‘all clear’ and returned BMS to normal operations.”
McIntyre said it might have been a student trying to get in late to class, but he wanted to investigate.
There are protocols the schools follow for different kinds of threats.
In his letter to parents, Lokey said this was not a lockdown, which is used for higher levels of threats. During a lockdown, all classroom doors are closed, lights are out and students and staff keep out of sight of doors and windows.
“This status is reserved for an immediate threat confirmed on the campus or within the building,” Lokey wrote. “Again, this was not the case today.”
Lokey said the lockout was a reasonable response to having an unknown person on a nearby campus. The middle school is a few blocks away, or about 2,000 feet east of the high school.
“Teachers and students in the building know what’s going on” during a lockout, Lokey said, noting that his safety team of six staff members were in touch via radios during the incident.
“Everybody else was sheltered and went to work as usual,” he said.
Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call the Bayfield Marshal’s Office at 884-9636.
