In East Oakland, parents at Horace Mann Elementary School are upset after the district failed to immediately notify them of a lockdown Tuesday. Students were held in classrooms for up to six hours as police swarmed the area in order to arrest armed suspects in a string of home-invasion robberies.
Ernest Carroll’s daughter was in her second day of kindergarten when the school went into lockdown. He says the district never called to tell him what was going on, and he later heard about it from a friend.
“And I didn’t find out about it till about 12:30, 1 o’clock,” Carroll said. “So a lot of parents weren’t notified, so when everybody did get here, it was like chaos.”
Some parents heard about it on the news, others — like Marina Rivera — from the sounds helicopters hovering overhead.
“We had to come to the school to find out, and that’s sad,” Rivera said. “We seen helicopters going around and going around and we just started walking.”