Weapons are discovered at Dillard Middle, Eastern Wayne
By John Joyce
Published in News on March 16, 2016 1:46 PM
Students at two different Wayne County public schools were found to be in possession of weapons on school grounds Tuesday.
In one instance, at Eastern Wayne Middle School, a student said he brought a pocket knife to school to protect his sister.
In the other, a student at Dillard Middle School was found to have an unloaded BB gun and a red bandanna. When the items were found in his bookbag during a search, the student said he had bought he B.B. gun at school from another student two weeks earlier.
According to the police report, the student at Dillard will face a juvenile petition, meaning charges.
No charges were specified on the other report.
Ken Derksen, public information officer for Wayne County Public Schools, said the school system takes these kinds of instances very seriously.
"The school district takes all issues such as weapons serious," Derksen said. "And there are consequences."
Derksen is prohibited legally from discussing disciplinary actions taken against individual students, but he said the weapons and contraband policy and the consequences for violating those policies are listed in the Wayne County Board of Education policy manual available online.
"Students who violate the policy can be subject to, within the district policy, potential consequences," Derksen said.
Any criminal charges, he said, would be left up to the police department.
Maj. Anthony Carmon of the Goldsboro Police department said school resource officers, the police assigned to schools for safety, do not conduct random searches.
"We do not check the students for anything," Carmon explained. "These incidents are brought to us by the schools."
Carmon said the resource officers are there to enforce the general statutes set by the state of North Carolina, and to protect the students and faculty. It is only when alerted by school staff that a student might be in possession of some form of contraband that an officer will initiate a search, he said.
In the case at Eastern Wayne, the student was searched only after another student informed teachers he had been showing the knife around in the boys bathroom. He was taken to the principal's office where he tried to stash the knife under a chair while he thought she was not looking, the police report said.
In the Dillard incident, the report said the student, a fifth-grader, was suspected of smoking marijuana and/or cigarettes in the boy's room with two other juveniles. She decided to check the three boys for tobacco or marijuana, and upon checking their lockers she discovered the BB gun.