By Tom Gilchrist
For The Advertiser
MAYVILLE — Police said someone spotted a man carrying a shotgun into a house next door to Mayville Elementary School minutes before classes were dismissed Tuesday afternoon, prompting a “hard lockdown” for students in all three Mayville Community Schools buildings until authorities found no threat.
The 18-year-old Saginaw man legally possessed the firearm, and was returning the unloaded gun to its owner who lived on Orchard Street adjacent to the school when someone saw him and reported the situation to school employees, said interim Mayville Police Chief Tony Coln.
“His timing was just terrible,” Coln said of the man who carried the shotgun into the home. “Everything was on the up and up. It was just poor judgment on the part of the young man transporting the firearm from the vehicle.”
Teachers locked the school district’s students inside all classrooms for a number of minutes while authorities investigated the report, said Mayville Superintendent Rhonda Blackburn.
“A concerned citizen came in and said that he had noticed something — something that he thought was abnormal outside,” Blackburn said. “Well, you hear that and we don’t take any chances. We don’t say ‘Oh, we’ll check on it later.’”
Blackburn said Christopher Kidd, principal of Mayville High School and Mayville Middle School, did an “awesome job” of handling the situation, which took place while Blackburn and Mayville Elementary School Principal Kim Morden were in Lansing obtaining information on applying for state grant money.
Kidd told Mayville Board of Education members about the incident at the board’s regular meeting Tuesday night.
Coln said he responded to the scene to investigate the matter after the person reported the situation to school employees about 2:30 p.m., which Blackburn said is “close to the release time for (students boarding) buses.”
Blackburn said the hard lockdown lasted “10 minutes at the most.”
Coln said the Saginaw man was “extremely cooperative” with police investigating the situation. “Over the weekend he and someone who lives at the (Orchard Street) house had gone on a hunting trip and he was just legally returning the firearm,” said Coln, adding he won’t pursue any criminal charges related to the incident.
“The whole thing was a misunderstanding and it got cleared up,” Coln said.
In other action at Tuesday’s school board meeting, the board accepted the resignation of Shad Fish, who teaches U.S. history and physical education at Mayville High and Mayville Middle School. Fish has taken a job as an administrator with Houghton Lake Community Schools, as the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Grant Project Director.
Fish starts his new job on Monday. He said his wife, Jennifer Fish, plans on continuing as a math teacher at Mayville High School.