What to do when your child’s school is on lockdown. Lessons from tragedy near Selma campus

As law enforcement swarmed Selma neighborhoods during a frantic manhunt Tuesday for a gunman who killed a police officer, hundreds of frightened parents flocked to nearby Eric White Elementary School, hoping to take their children home to safety.

But the campus was locked down because of the shooting, leaving a crowd of frustrated parents outside the school that also caused further logistical complications for district officials who were already navigating a complicated hours-long lockdown.

In an interview Wednesday morning, Selma Unified Superintendent Marilyn Shepherd told The Bee’s Education Lab that she understands that parents “just wanted to hold their babies” — while also acknowledging that made the lockdown more difficult.

“Actually, when we’re in lockdown, you shouldn’t go to the school,” she said. “There’s a lockdown for a reason.”

The school’s security protocol was triggered by the fatal shooting of Selma police Officer Gonzalo Carrasco, Jr., who’d been with the department for two years. Suspect Nathaniel Dixon was later taken into custody in connection with the shooting.

“People need to understand when there’s a lockdown, and there really is an activity that’s going on, we cannot release the students,” she added.

The district’s going to work on educating families about do’s and don’ts during a lockdown as a result.

Another perhaps obvious lockdown “don’t” is allowing students to leave the classrooms. But that’s true even if they’re locked down for hours without food.

Some students at Eric White experienced that exact unanticipated scenario Tuesday, Shepherd said.

The school’s lockdown started around 11:45 a.m., shortly before the upper grades at the K-6 school were due for lunch. They stayed in their classrooms until after 3 p.m.

Now the district knows that “every classroom needs some kind some kind of supplies to handle that,” she said.

“Parents were asking questions about it, but when you’re locked down, you can’t go out of the classroom. So, you know, some personal needs and all that have to be responded to within the classroom,” she added.

Preparing for these scenarios — and the difficulty of anticipating every issue that may arise — is a challenge all-too-familiar to K-12 schools around the country, where mass shootings on K-12 campuses continue to heighten parents’ and families’ fears for their own children.

After a lockdown at Fresno Unified’s Bullard High School last year, questions were raised when parents flocked to the locked down campus due to reports of an active shooter that later were determined to have been a hoax.

This issue also came up in discussions of Bullard’s controversial cell phone ban, as some families and students worried about the inability to contact their students in the event of a campus emergency.

Many Fresno-area schools have safety plans parents can review

Despite the inherent uncertainty to the situations, Selma, Fresno Unified, and other districts do have existing protocols in place.

Clovis Unified spokesperson Kelly Avants referred the Ed Lab to the district’s “School Safety” guidance online, which includes a glossary of terms that may be used during an emergency to other information.

Like Selma Unified, Clovis Unified’s guidance for parents is that it’s “best to wait for additional instructions and only head to school during a lockdown or shelter in place if instructed to do so.”

Central and Fresno Unified spokespersons didn’t immediately respond to questions about their own recommendations to parents, but each has similar information available online.

What’s the Selma’s biggest piece of advice for other school districts after Tuesday’s lockdown? Nail down your parent-child reunification plans.

“When Uvalde occurred, and the kids were running out and the parents were grabbing them,” she said, “that scared me because you just can’t do that. You don’t know who the kids are going to and so forth.”

The district is working on a plan to ensure parents are safely reunited with their children in these scenarios.

While the events of Tuesday underscored some areas for improvement, Shepherd also praised the communication she and the district got from local law enforcement throughout the day, as well as Selma Unified’s staff.

“It was quite an afternoon,” she said, “but I cannot say enough about the agencies that were there supporting our schools.”