Wake County School Board evaluates response to incident at Heritage High School

CARY, N.C. (WTVD) -- The Wake County School Board met Tuesday to talk about a security incident on the first week of school at Heritage High School in Wake Forest.

Late last month, the school was evacuated because of a bomb threat investigation.

Students were left outside for two hours in the heat and some had to be taken to the hospital as a result.

On Tuesday, ABC11 learned that there was a second threat that day that changed the complexity of the evacuation.

There was also a technical error that led to issues getting information out to parents as quickly as possible.

"The urgency to get notifications out, to have them out quickly has increased," said Lisa Luten, senior director of communications for the Wake County Public School System.

She and her team fielded questions from board members, many of which were sent to them by parents.

"Every time we get a threat, we have to investigate it as the real thing because you never really know," said Kendrick Scott, senior director of security for WCPSS. "We deal with this much more than we want to be dealing with it."

ABC11 News talked to Kendrick hours after he made a presentation in front of the Wake County School Board about the incident at Heritage.

"It's happening across the country," Scott said. "It's not just unique to Wake County Schools. It's everywhere and a lot of people are grappling with how to get around this, how to get our minds around stopping this from happening."

Scott said one way parents can help is to not spread the threat on social media. Instead, he said to call WCPSS 24 hours a day, seven days a week at (919) 856-1911.

He said students can also do their part.

"If it's a student in the building, the No. 1 thing they can do is let an adult know, let an administrator know, let (a school resource officer) know," he said.

He also understood why parents want to come to school to get their children immediately after a threat but often that is more dangerous for first responders.

"Those kinds of things cause us more distress than letting us deal with what's in front of us," he said. "We have emergency response plans for any type of incident."