Unfounded reports of a gunman barricaded in a Manhattan high school sparked a lockdown on Thursday – but shaken parents were left railing against a cellphone ban after the scare.
A 911 call was placed about an “unidentified male locked in the school bathroom with a firearm” at Louis D. Brandeis High School at 9:40 am, as distressed parents rushed to the Upper West Side campus desperate for information.
“How about we never take their phones again?” mom Selina Elias told The Post
Elias, whose daughter Adrianna Vega is a junior at the Urban Careers for Green Education located on campus, said there had been a ban just lifted this year.
“Because she has her cellphone, I was able to find out that the school was on lockdown this morning,” Otherwise, the school did not contact us at all,” she said.
The entire campus — which has been divided into several smaller schools after struggling for years with spotty attendance, safety issues and a low graduation rate — went into lockdown for a grueling hour-and-a-half stretch. It ended after cops swept the buildings and found nothing, authorities said.
The scare comes as the city is considering a district-wide ban which would go into effect by 2025. Logistical complications and concerns from parents and teachers unions have halted progress on the plan.
Aaliyah Thompson, 15, who is also a junior at Urban Careers for Green Education High School, said she was keeping track of the lockdown through social media on her phone.
“I seen on Instagram, some kids would be like the SWAT team is coming in, the first floor. They were taking kids out one by one,” she said.
“I am happy [I had my phone] I texted my mom and my dad,” Aaliyah added. “My dad was letting me know about everything that was going on. He was telling me from afar about what they were doing.”
There are five small schools on campus, including four high schools: Frank McCourt High School, Global Learning Collaborative, Innovation Diploma Plus and Urban Assembly for Green Careers.
The fifth school is Upper West Success Academy, a charter elementary school that is part of the popular Success Academy network of charter schools.
Global Learning Collaborative is the only school with a an existing cellphone ban.
Earlier on Thursday Chancellor David Banks cited the “complexities” of the phone ban during an interview with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer.
“I have heard from many parents who said, ‘Absolutely not,’ they’re watching tragedies unfold in schools. We just saw a week or so ago [the Georgia school shooting]. That scares parents,” Banks explained.
Conversely, he said there’s no doubt that the phones are a “distraction.”
“Kids can barely focus on their work because they’re so connected to their phone,” he said.
Speaking to The Post, Banks confirmed that “about 350 schools already ban cellphones, and based on our preliminary surveying this summer, over 500 more are considering adopting a policy this year.”
