By John Brice
Correspondent
In the aftermath of the school shooting tragedy that took place earlier this month in Winder, Georgia there was a heightened level of safety procedures enacted at Valley High School on Friday, September 13th of 2024.
What ensued was a tidal wave of wild rumors that swirled around the community and across social media in reaction to VHS having gone into a “Secure Your Area” safety mode and school resource officers sweeping the building for firearms using a weapons detection dog borrowed from Lee County law enforcement.
Seeking to clarify the situation which sparked the widespread community concerns, Chambers County School District Superintendent Casey Chambley recorded a video message addressing the incident which was then distributed online to the public.
Chambley began by stating “First, I want to thank all of our administrators in the district, all of our staff for the hard work that you have done this week and how tough it has been trying to navigate through some of these situations. Thank you for all of your hard work. I want to thank our SRO teams. I want to thank the local authorities; the Valley Police Department, the Chambers County Sheriff’s Department and the Lee County Sheriff’s Department for the hard work that you have put in and the investigations that you have put in trying to help keep our staff and our students and our faculty safe on our campuses in Chambers County.” He went on to continue “I want to thank all of the parents, thank you. I know that this has been difficult and these are difficult times when we have to deal with things like this. It is tough on y’all not knowing, we understand that. It is tough on our staff, it is tough on the students. Our primary goal and objective is to educate our students and to educate your kids. That is what we want to do and to keep them safe and to deliver them back home to you like you sent them, safe. That is our number one priority.”
Providing further context, Chambley remarked “What I want to do today is I want to clear up a few things and I want to go over some things and give a little bit more detail about what went on and what happened. Again, thank you for being patient with us. I know that everybody understands, I hope everybody understands, we have safety protocol and things that have to be followed. We can’t just release information right when things happen.” He went on to continue “First, let me say that there was not a lockdown for any Chambers County school today. Chambers County school was not in lockdown for any of our schools, we did not have an official lockdown. Here are the facts as we know them right now. This morning, the principal at Valley High School received a ‘bark alert’. A bark alert is an alert that they receive through technology, it alerts the administrators when there is activity or something triggers activity of a weapon or something that kids shouldn’t be looking up on the internet or sending over the internet or emailing. It could be anything. If kids are researching the prohibition movement and they are researching alcohol, it may bring that up and send the principal a bark alert on that and they would figure out what was going on and research that and deal with it appropriately if they needed to.”
Explaining the timeline of events, Chambley commented “This morning, the principal received a bark alert that an email had been sent between two students. No threat was made in this email, it was one email sent from one student to the other using the Chambers County School chromebooks. The email was sent and it was a picture that was taken off the internet from google and it was a man with a gun. One student sent it to the other student and because there was a weapon in the photo it sent a bark alert to the principal. When the principal saw this, this morning, he alerted us and he alerted the authorities and the SROs and they started to look into this and investigate it. Because of the other situations that had happened previously, earlier in the week, the rumors that had been going around our district and many others in Georgia and some other areas they decided to because of taking full precaution to look deeper into this.”
He went on to continue “They alerted the SROs and immediately went into action. The students were not on campus yet. They immediately looked to find where they were going to be, whether they were bus riders or car riders. They got the students before they ever got to school, got them to the office without incident. No issue was had with that. They then called the parents, they searched the students. Students had no weapons on them. Again, let me say; these two students never made a threat. This was not a threat incident. It was out of precaution, because of the bark alert that triggered them into this next stage. Parents came, when that happened they then searched the vehicle. One student drove, one was on a bus.”
Summing up his statement, Chambley concluded “It was the father’s vehicle, the father said. In the vehicle they found an empty holster, an old ammo box, an empty ammo box with no ammunition in it, a small hunting knife and a vape. Upon that time, they were then taken back to the office and discipline was handled. This is being handled by the Board of Education, the Valley Police Department. No incident was had, between those two, with those students and no threat was made.”
