By Daniel de Vise and Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Montgomery County school officials say they are investigating why security measures were not enacted for more than 90 minutes after a student fired a pistol inside Albert Einstein High School in Kensington last week.

Students and teachers carried on as normal, changing classes and taking bathroom breaks, while security workers responded to an 11:30 a.m. report from a student of a bang that "sounded like a gunshot" coming from a bathroom. They quickly found a hole in the bathroom, about the size of a bullet, and were joined by Montgomery police officers. But the principal wasn't notified until about 1 p.m.

"We made a mistake," said Einstein Principal James Fernandez, addressing several hundred parents in the school cafeteria Monday night. "It's being addressed, trust me, and it's something that we have learned from and that the whole school system will certainly learn from."

The delayed response, acknowledged by school officials from the start, has been overshadowed by the successes that followed. Police used high-definition surveillance cameras to locate suspects and find three loaded handguns and several knives in a locker. Officials allege that at least one student was trying to sell the guns.

Five students were charged in connection with the incident. No one was injured. Once emergency procedures were implemented, they were followed to the letter.

Montgomery police spokeswoman Lucille Baur said that the department is reviewing the incident but that it was too soon to comment on the time lapse. She said a police officer inside the school was told that a student had reported a bang "like a firecracker."

But the time lapse remained a concern at the Monday meeting, a session that yielded both praise and pillory of how the school handled the incident. One parent told Fernandez, "I just want to underscore the number and type and range of things that could have happened" during those 90 minutes.

Public schools nationwide have drawn up and rehearsed elaborate emergency plans over the past decade, responding to a steady drumbeat of security threats from school shootings to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to the D.C. sniper case. The error at Einstein serves as a frustrating reminder, school officials say, that the procedures work only if they are followed.

"We had an internal breakdown," said Robert Hellmuth, director of school safety and security for the 137,000-student Montgomery system. He said he could not recall a similar lapse of judgment in more than decade of school security work.

It has become common to reconstruct events after a school emergency. After the Virginia Tech shootings, a year ago today, many in the community questioned why university officials had waited more than two hours to alert the entire campus to the first casualties. In that case, university leaders said they did not immediately see that two early-morning dormitory shootings could be prelude to the subsequent classroom rampage.

In the Einstein case, responsibility centers on the leader of a five-person school security team that reports to the principal. A Montgomery police officer assigned to the school is also involved in the investigation; he alerted his superiors at the police department but not school administrators.

Fernandez said he reminded the team leader in a March 10 meeting on school security: "Anything serious, I need to know immediately."

In a briefing after the incident, Hellmuth said the team leader told him that he did not contact the principal because "they couldn't make a determination of what they had."

"And he didn't want to start panicking people if it wasn't a gunshot," Hellmuth said. "These people investigate things all day long. Some of it doesn't pan out."

Hellmuth and Fernandez give this account of what happened that morning:

The gun was fired about 11:30 a.m. Within minutes, a group of students approached a pair of security workers in a second-floor hallway and asked, "Did you hear that bang?" One of the students added, "It sounded like a gunshot that came from that bathroom."

The guards checked the bathroom and found a possible bullet hole in a wall. One guard went off in search of his team leader. They returned together a few minutes later along with the educational facilities officer, the police officer assigned to the school. The hole was studied further. A custodian was summoned. He told them that the hole "was absolutely not here at 9:30 this morning."

Baur confirmed that the police officer was brought "fairly quickly" into the search. At some point, the officer called his superior at a District station in Wheaton, although it's not clear when. The supervisor and a detective arrived at the school about 12:30 p.m.

About 1 p.m., the security team gave its findings to Linda Jasper, an assistant school administrator. Jasper quickly located Fernandez, who was in a classroom speaking about college admissions. Ten minutes later, Fernandez placed the school on Code Blue, a low-level emergency procedure that requires staff to account for all students.

Ten minutes after that, at 1:20 p.m., Fernandez overheard a police sergeant say, "I'm calling it," signifying he had concluded that a gun had been fired. Baur said the detective didn't realize at the time that Fernandez was the principal. After hearing the detective's remarks, Fernandez placed the school on Code Red lockdown.