On Tuesday, Dec. 14, Poughkeepsie City Schools Superintendent Eric Rosser said that a citywide outage led to an unfounded report of a shooting inside the middle building that quickly spread throughout the community.
Officials said that during the outage, a student called a parent saying that he heard a gunshot, prompting a call to police, which investigated the report, determining that students and staff were safe.
“Reports of a school shooting at Poughkeepsie Middle School are inaccurate,” the district posted on its social media accounts on Tuesday afternoon.
The district also sent out text, email, and voice messages notifying parents of power outages at the middle and high schools and that the rumors of the shooting were false.
The building was given the all-clear at approximately 2 p.m., though the district opted to dismiss students early following the force alarm.
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