Pewaukee Schools Shut Down, Cause Homecoming Clutter

On Friday, October 2, the Pewaukee School District was forced to shut its doors for the day after a handwritten note was discovered in the boys locker room on Thursday, October 1, warning of a school shooting the following Friday.

This note was discovered on the same day the shooting at the Umpqua Oregon Community College occured.

Due to this safety threat, the Pewaukee School District called for a mandatory lockdown of all four schools on campus. All schools announced the lockdown after school on Thursday, October 1. This includes Horizon Elementary School, Pewaukee Lake Elementary School, Asa Clark Middle School, and Pewaukee High School.

No students or faculty were allowed to attend school on Friday, October 2.

After the lockdown, the district rescheduled homecoming events. The annual homecoming football game was moved from the classic “Friday night lights” scheduling to Saturday, October 3, at 1 PM.

Sam Ramlow is an athlete who plays for the Pewaukee High School football team, and says “having to reschedule the game from Friday to Saturday affected me the most, because then I had to play on Saturday, the day of the dance.”

The Pewaukee football team lost the homecoming game, 0-34.

Ramlow says, “I had almost no energy to do anything that night.”

Whether or not the homecoming dance would still occur on schedule was up in the air for a brief amount of time. However it was decided, after a thorough search of the grounds, that the homecoming dance would remain on and as scheduled on Saturday, October 3.

The threat of an attack was never carried out.

Pewaukee High School junior, Ramlow, says the threat of violence has not made him any more skeptical of his peers “because it was just one stupid kid trying to ruin homecoming.”

Arrowhead sophomore Tessa DeQuardo says she planned on attending the Pewaukee homecoming dance.

DeQuardo says she was not intimidated by the threat, and in the end did attend the dance.

“I think the teen that posed this threat was new to the school and therefore didn’t have many friends, let alone any plans to go to homecoming,” DeQuardo says. “It was really a sick thing to do and saddens me somebody could intentionally ruin something for so many students.”

DeQuardo says, “Personally, the biggest inconvenience was the game being moved to 1pm on Saturday. It was a weird time and especially difficult for all the girls who wanted to get ready for homecoming. Consequently, a lot less people showed up than would have on Friday night.”