Yesterday afternoon, Husband and I were working from our home office when I received a broadcast e-mail from the school district. It said that, due to an emergency, the area schools had been put on lockdown, meaning that no students would be allowed to leave, either on bus or by foot, until further notice. Since each school is a half-mile to a mile away from any other school, we figured the threat had to be a pretty general one, but we still hurried down to the kindergarten building to be close by.

There were no emergency vehicles outside the school, which was reassuring. At least we were reasonably sure there was no imminent hostage situation. There was no one at all, in fact. I imagine the stay-at-home parents don’t monitor their e-mail that closely in the middle of the day, and working parents had farther to travel. After a few minutes other parents started showing up, their phones ringing with the automated calls from the school district. There was no more real information in the recordings, though.

Then the parents began to get calls from their kids in the middle and high schools and from friends elsewhere in town. One father told us, authoritatively, there had been a robbery at the bank by the middle school. Another mother contradicted this report and said her friend, a city cop, had told her there was an armed man inside the elementary school. Someone told us that an armed man in camouflage, likely a hunter, had been spotted at the dump. Someone else said that the parents arriving at the middle school had been ushered into the building and “locked down” along with the kids.

I wondered aloud what the children were being told. One woman said that the elementary school kids had been instructed to hide under their desks because there was a skunk loose in the building. I hoped their critical thinking skills were advanced enough to debunk that nonsense. Any six-year-old could tell you that hiding under a desk is no defense against a skunk. You hide under your desk to ward off a nuclear attack. Duh!

(Interesting magazine article proposal: “Threats Forcing Schoolchildren to Hide Under Their Desks, Through the Ages.” 19th to early twentieth century: Natural disasters! 1941 - 1945: German air raids! 1945 - 1970s: Nuclear holocaust! 1980s: Intruders with guns! 1990s: Students with guns! 2001: Anthrax! and so on.)

Most of the parents were calm, but the swirling rumors and the complaints lent an edge of hysteria to the whole event. The complaints came in two flavors: The school district was overreacting! or The school district was not doing enough to protect our children! One mother questioned whether the school doors were even locked during the day. Husband volunteered, “I walked right in the other day to use the rest room,” and that upset her further.

Eventually, they let us in to get the kids, and later that evening a more detailed account was posted on-line by the local paper. A masked man, dressed in camouflage and carrying a handgun, had threatened a worker at the city dump. The police went searching for him and decided to lock down the schools so children walking home wouldn’t be at risk of encountering him. An elementary school student called his mother on his cell phone to tell her about the situation, but she misunderstood his explanation and called 911 to report that an armed man had been spotted in the elementary school. This forced the police to set up a cordon around the school perimeter, and all the students had to hide in their locked classrooms until the police realized it had been a mistake.

So, the police and the school district made a judgment call that might have caused a minor inconvenience to students, but who was responsible for dozens of armed, Kevlar-clad police officers surrounding the elementary school? A hysterical parent, that’s who.

If I’m ever in that situation again, I will be very, very careful not to repeat any rumors I happen to hear, and I’ll try not to listen to any, either.

So, last night I woke up in the middle of the night, and something was bothering me. Something besides the prospect of a masked gunman invading my child’s school. By morning, I realized what was wrong.

“Exactly WHEN did you go into the school to use the bathroom?” I asked my husband.

“After school one day. All the kids were playing at the playground, and Aitch had to go, so we went back in the school.”

“But that’s NOT what you told that mother. You made it sound like you were hanging out in the boys’ bathroom in the middle of the school day, by yourself.”

Later that day, I saw versions of the story on the comments attached to the updated on-line news story, and on the mothers’ club forum. The next manhunt in town is going to be for Husband. And if he has to register as a sex offender, we’re going to have to move out of the vicinity of any of the schools. We might have to set up camp at the dump.

By the way, they’re going to be testing the sirens at the nuclear power plant this weekend. I’m expecting the town’s reaction to be something along the lines of “War of the Worlds.”