Students arrived at school Thursday morning on an assembly schedule, only to be sent home before the first bell rang.
At approximately 7:58 a.m. Dec. 1, the school was evacuated due to a bomb threat. Once the building was cleared of students, authorities searched the premises but found no objects of suspicion. Classes resumed Friday, Dec. 2.
A police investigation is underway.
The threat, posted on the South entrance of the school, was discovered by a female student early Thursday morning. At around 7:20 a.m. she notified Principal Ed West, who took quick action to secure the building.
“I went and took [the note] off the window,” West said, “brought it in [my office] and called law enforcement and district personnel and said, ‘Hey, it’s on the door. We have cameras. I’m gonna go check that out.’”
Because the video footage could not produce “quick resolutions,” West and authorities prepared to evacuate the campus. The gymnasium was secured to temporarily accommodate students without rides as they waited for transportation to arrive.
West did not believe there were bombs inside the building.
“If there’s something that’s taped outside of the door, it means they didn’t have access to the inside,” he said. “If there was something, it’s probably outside the building, not inside.”
Parents were notified by the district message system, though due to technical glitches, parents did not begin to receive the messages until 9:45 am or later. However, every student and teacher was evacuated within approximately 25 minutes of the initial announcement over the school intercom.
“Whether it was correct information, misinformation or no information,” West said, “the part that everyone seemed to understand is that it’s time to go. And they did, and they did in a respectful, calm manner, and there really weren’t any issues.”
Though Thursday was supposed to be a shortened school day—six hours instead of seven—the deficit may need to be made up.
“We are bound by Kansas regulations to have 1,116 hours of school,” West said. “I think that because of missing [Thursday] we’re going to fall short.”
If the district does determine that the school must compensate for the missed day, there are “a variety of ways to do that,” according to West, such as extending the school day by a few minutes or adding one of the April snow days to the schedule.
Rescheduling the planned assembly is less straightforward.
“There’s never a good day for a bomb threat, but yesterday was certainly not a good day,” West said.
The speaker, Mark Scharenbroich of Minn., was to stop at Free State to share with students his presentation entitled, “The Greatest Days of Your Life…So Far.”  
“It’s all about taking advantage of the moment that you have, doing the best you can,” West said, “but also kind of connecting the dots in terms of different student groups, or students and parents and community, and how we can support each other and bring each other together.”
West hopes Scharenbroich will be able to return sometime second semester.
“There is no doubt in my mind that if we could have heard him, some of the things that we’ve tried to do here—either with our efforts with IPS or our efforts with the Renaissance program, or just the climate and culture of the building—would have been strengthened tenfold and really would have helped us move further along to where we want to be,” he said.