ROLESVILLE, N.C. (WNCN) — Wednesday afternoon, parents lined up outside Rolesville High School worried.
“My heart just sank, you know, you get emotional,” said Natasha Burnette, mother of a 10th grader at Rolesville High.
The school said in part: “This morning at 10:47 a.m., a staff member observed a student outside of class. the staff member stopped the student, and during the process, they were found in possession of a loaded firearm. The firearm was confiscated.”
Rolesville High immediately went into a code red lockdown.
At 1:15 p.m., once the threat level was downgraded, students were dismissed.
“It’s scary. The fear of the unknown. The fear of being harmed or dying. Which we’ve seen teachers and students dying our schools,” said special education teacher Christina Spears.
Spears teaches special education within the Wake County Public School System and is the president of the Wake North Carolina Association of Educators.
She said the trend of guns in schools is frightening.
In December, Fuquay-Varina Middle School teacher Lynn Guilliams took a gun away from her sixth-grade student.
It happened after school district officials said the student fired the gun inside a classroom. No one was hurt.
CBS 17 asked Spears if educators are trained for these kinds of incidents.
“No. We are not trained. We do not have firearm safety training or here’s what you do if this happens. We do practice lockdown drills,” explained Spears. “There has been a call across this country, even in this state about if teachers should be armed. And we believe no. Our job is there to teach,” she stated.
Spears said navigating COVID-19 and the threat of violence has been traumatic for not only families, but teachers too.
“For us to go back into buildings and still experience those things. The feelings of it, but just the trauma of it all is really hard. All of that with the fear of can I potentially be harmed by a gun at school, it’s a lot,” she mentioned.
Spears said WCPSS is transparent when it comes to safety. She mentioned the district does audits to figure out what works and what doesn’t. She said the next step is to continue to push lawmakers to do something.