It was a typical Wednesday at Jones College Prep. Students had just completed their hikes through the halls to complete their last class of the day.  As teachers began their lessons, Principal Kerry Dolan received an email that proceeded to send students, staff, and parents into a panic. On March 5, Jones College Prep was sent into a hard lockdown due to outside threats to the building. 

“So yesterday afternoon (around 1:45 or later), I received a threatening email from an unknown source that didn’t appear to be a student in our building, for a number of reasons that I won’t go into, that basically threatened violence,” said Dolan. 

After reading the email, Dolan assumed it was a hoax but knew she still had to follow protocol.

“We still had to do our due diligence and follow both CPS (Chicago Public Schools) and CPD (Chicago Police Department) procedure. So we reached out to our network safety manager. We called 911, we reached out to my network chief,” said Dolan. “We contacted CPS communications because I knew we’d have to start drafting communication to go out to our families, regardless of what was transpiring, just so that we were all on the same page.”

Shortly after Dolan called, CPD arrived at the scene.

“As CPD was arriving, we were advised to keep you guys on a soft lockdown,” said Dolan. “So there were a few students that were still in the hallways at that point. So we tried to keep pushing students into rooms. At that time, it was more of an internal lockdown. So we weren’t announcing it, because we didn’t want to alarm anybody until we knew what procedure we had to follow. And so that was when everybody heard the hard lockdown announcement, when CPD advised us that we needed to shift to a hard lockdown.”

Students locked in rooms began to panic as they monitored apps like Citizen and rumors began spreading through social media. 

“At some point, while CPD was here, students started panicking, calling their parents, and their parents started calling 911, and making reports that were also not necessarily true, which only made the situation a little bit scarier on the ground, because then they got a call that there was an active shooter,” said Dolan. “There was a lot of rumors and they were not the case, but it was a frightened parent who was playing a really bad game of telephone.” 

While in lockdown, students tried to get as much information as possible until help came. 

“Yeah, well, we’re on the Citizen app watching live streams and looking at the timeline of events,” said Tomas Hadden ‘25. “And then just sat around for a really long time, and then eventually we saw that there was SWAT on the second floor, clearing that out. Okay, we’ll be out of here soon. And then, like, 20 minutes later, we hear the door handle jiggling and SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) busts in, And then they walked in.” 

As CPD and SWAT checked each floor, students were cleared out of the building.

“They had a single file out of the classroom, walked down the hallway, and they just stood in the hallway for like 20 minutes in a giant line until they let us out,” said Hadden.

Jones has implemented extra staff on sight to help students deal with the aftermath. 

“Knowing that yesterday was really scary, we wanted to make sure that we had extra support in place for all of you today, which like, although our counselors and social workers are wonderful, we wanted to make sure that we had people who were additionally trained specifically in crisis scenarios to be on site,” said Dolan. 

Dolan and Jones will learn from this experience, especially with procedures with substitute teachers. 

“So for example, one of the things I recognize is that moving forward, whenever we have a lockdown drill, security needs to go to every room where there’s a sub first and lock those rooms by hand,” said Dolan. 

Overall, parents and students have reached out to express gratitude for how the events were handled.

“We did receive some outreach yesterday from students and staff, specifically who were just kind of checking in to make sure we were okay,” said Dolan. “Throughout the night and into this morning, we got more outreach from parents, just like expressing gratitude that their children were with them and thanking us for following protocol and making sure that we were abiding by what we should in terms of our safety plans and procedures.”