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PROVO — A Provo elementary school has been declared safe after bomb threats Thursday morning placed it under lockdown for a time. But police are still searching for the person who made the threats.
Two calls from the same number were made to Edgemont Elementary, 566 E. 3650 North in Provo, at 9:14 a.m. Thursday. The caller threatened to blow the school up.
The caller is believed to be male, although police are "not 100-percent sure. It could be anybody," according to Lt. Mathew Siufanua with the Provo Police Department.
Provo police responded to the calls and immediately placed the school under lockdown. Soon after, the school resource officer arrived at the scene and began to do a cursory sweep, according to Siufanua.
A bomb squad with three K9 units then did a security sweep of the outside and inside of the school. The lockdown was lifted when it was determined there was no threat.
The Provo police are working with Century Link to track down the phone number of the caller who made the threat.
Police asked parents not to show up at the school while it was locked down.
Any parent who goes by and sees all the police and fire trucks is concerned.
–Dr. Greg Hudnall
"Any parent who goes by and sees all the police and fire trucks is concerned," said Dr. Greg Hudnall, associate superintendent of the Provo School District. "One of the things we try to be cautious with is that with parents responding, we get all the cars here, and then we can't have our police and fire and response vehicle get into the parking lot."
Hudnall said regardless of the guidelines in place, schools always have some concerned parents show up. He said one woman concerned about her daughter showed up to the school on Thursday, but was told she could not take her daughter out of school while a lockdown was in place.
"It's just to make sure everybody's safe," Hudnall said. "Police don't know the parents and don't recognize them, and sometimes the individual will try to show up on their own. For safety reasons, we don't evacuate kids out of the classrooms."
Hudnall said he appreciated the support of the Provo Police Department in ensuring the safety of the students.
"The thing I appreciate most as an educator is that when we have a problem, we have immediate response by our law enforcement," he said.
