A 16-year-old Milford Mill Academy student was arrested Tuesday evening on juvenile assault and weapons charges in the shooting of two other students with a BB gun, police said.
The boy, whose name was not released, faces charges of assault and of having a deadly weapon on school property, a police spokesman said.
Milford Mill was under lockdown for about two hours after the incident Tuesday morning, with students staying an extra half hour in their first period classes until the school was declared safe, principal Nathaniel Gibson said.
“Everything went off the way it was supposed to. The kids did fantastic,” Gibson said.
Second period was shortened a bit to accommodate the lengthier first classes of the day, he said, and “we were able to go on with the rest of the school day.”
About 35 parents came to the school to pick up their children, Gibson said, and some of them expressed frustration that they had to wait while the students were signed out, according to the normal procedure.
“We had counselors standing by, but the kids didn?t need them,” he said. “Some of our kids really didn?t know what happened until I gave them a letter to give to their parents.”
One of the students who was injured Tuesday came back to school before the end of the day, he said.
Baltimore County schools reported suspending students 415 times in the 2004-05 school year for having weapons in school, according to the state?s Department of Education.
At least 32 of those suspensions were for guns.
But the shooting Tuesday was an aberration atMilford Mill, Gibson said, and students told him Wednesday that they didn?t want the school to be negatively portrayed because of the incident.
The school, which is now modeled after a college system with four separate schools running in one building, has changed a lot in the past few years, he said.
Students focus on engineering, arts or technology and are oriented toward college from the beginning, he said.
“It was an isolated incident,” Gibson said, adding that the boy who was arrested is a “good kid, and he really can?t understand why he did it.”
