POWDER SPRINGS, Ga. — Gunfire at McEachern High School in Cobb County, in the parking lot during an argument, wounded two people.
Suspects were still on the run as of late Thursday night.
Students are saying they are fed up and angry that guns were on campus. They ask why anyone can come onto campus, onto school property, with guns and open fire, shooting people.
Police are trying to identify and find the shooters and everyone else involved.
They said the two people who were shot and wounded are not McEachern students.
But Cobb County school board member Tre Hutchins said he’s learned that there were also students who came outside the school and were part of the argument in the parking lot that led to the gunfire.
“It’s like really sad,” said one student as she was walking home with friends. “And I really hope it doesn’t happen again. Because, like, it’s scary.”
McEachern students spoke with 11Alive minutes after the Code Red lockdown was lifted.
They praise the response from police and the school.
But they want better security to prevent guns from coming onto campus in the first place.
“Like, it’s an open campus, so people can just walk in and out, like, there’s really no security there,” said another student. “I know they have all these rules to keep us safe, but it’s not keeping us safe.”
And another student expressed her frustration: “They try to do everything to stop it and it still keeps happening.”
11Alive asked Hutchins, who represents the area that includes McEachern High School, “Do you wonder how those people got on campus with guns?”
He answered immediately, “No, I do not wonder about that. McEachern is an open campus... And so you can just actually drive right up onto the campus.”
“With guns?”
“With anything.”
Hutchins said incidents with weapons at schools are not unusual this school year.
For example, “There was a picture of a student who had taken a picture with an AR-15 in the building” earlier in the school year, he said.
And on Wednesday, he said, two weapons were found inside Pebblebrook High School, where his son is a student.
Hutchins said he’s been working since August, when there was a gun scare at a McEachern football game, to increase funding for more school resource officers and for better firearms detection technology, to keep guns off of school property and prevent putting students in danger ever again.
“That is the question” the school system has to address, he said, “and how do we fix it moving forward.”
“What’s the purpose?” said a student leaving McEachern, “it’s not stopping anything. People still come on the campus with any type of thing to hurt us.”
A school district administrator and the Cobb County police chief said Thursday that they could not be prouder of how the staff and police responded bravely to secure the school after the shooting; they did not address what needs to change that could have prevented it.