March 11, 2008
There was a conspicuous lack of cars in the parking lot of Central Bucks South on the morning of Feb. 29, 2008.
The lot, usually a hazardous jungle of dented station wagons, souped-up sports cars and impatient student drivers, was now emptied of roughly half its contents, and only a smattering of students filed into the back entrance of the school.
But there they were stopped: Instead of pushing through the doors and making their way to class, students crammed into the vestibule separating the lot from the first floor of the school, craning their necks to see the reason they were now at a standstill.
Beyond the vestibule doors, students were now removing their jackets and bookbags and placing them on one of two tables that had been set up and were being manned by a group of teachers and one stocky, stoic police officer. The teachers quickly patted down coats and glanced through backpack pockets, then waved students past the officer and on their way to class. There were metal-detecting wands on the tables, but these went untouched.
Surprisingly, few students showed signs of complaint, save for a few rolled eyes and muttered remarks about the setup resembling “a goddamn airport.”
This security routine was, obviously, not de rigueur for South. However, it had been anticipated throughout most of the school week.
On Feb. 27, South principal W. Rodney Stone had sent home a letter addressing student and parent concerns regarding a perceived threat to student safety, which would supposedly occur on leap day.
The letter assured members of the Central Bucks South community that there was no cause for alarm, but security measures would be heightened as a precaution.
Rumors of imminent danger had flared early in the week, when students began to whisper about the threat of a school shootout planned for the upcoming Friday. Soon, various students were expressing worry and expounding on wildly variant theories.
These ranged from a scenario of a Philadelphia gang assaulting the school as a means of revenge for a fight that had occurred two weeks prior, to a plot discovered at Middle Bucks Institute of Technology, to the vague conjecture "Because it’s a leap year."
The local CBS station reported that some rumors pointed to an attack by, nonsensically, two local anti-war groups, the Pink Army and the 229 Brigade.
There were several students who ignored or mocked the rumors, but even with a skeptical faction intact, the atmosphere of the school still held a general note of unease. Several students were adamant in their refusal to attend school on Friday, while the 12th-graders hastily made Feb. 29 the seniors’ "skip day."
Due to the inconsistency of the rumors (and to the fact that the Central Bucks South community is often bored), the "school shooting" looked to be a bit of exaggerated nonsense, though this did not stop CBS from immediately tackling the story with the kind of hyperventilating reportage reserved for slow news days and celebrity criminal trials. The news station even gave the rumor a nickname, the "Leap Year Threat."
But as Friday came and went, there was no danger to be had. The day proceeded calmly: No shots racketed through the halls, no suspicious characters wandered through the doors, not even a lunch fight broke out.
If anything, the day was unusually peaceful; the low attendance rate (reported by the Intelligencer as being 60 percent) allowed for quiet classrooms and uncrowded halls.
Around the time of the school’s fourth and final block of classes, another minor rumor reared its head: Apparently, the rumor mill was still hungry for some fearmongering, and had sparked the worry that "something" would occur at the end of the day. Teachers were told to assure students that there was nothing to fear, and the rest of the day passed without incident.
The paranoia sparked by the "Leap Year Threat" had been something to behold, a quiet force that swept through the school, put a few eager interviewees on the local news and ultimately resulted in little more than an attendance-office nightmare.
It seems that the power of the rumor will, for better or worse, remain a staple of the high school experience.
