OGDEN — An incident near a local school briefly enacted an elementary school’s security protocol Friday.

Parents of students at Wasatch Elementary School were sent a brief notice around 11 a.m. that a security situation had been resolved and that dismissal would still happen on time at 12:30 p.m.

Ogden School District Communications Specialist Jer Bates told the Standard-Examiner that the school enacted a less-disruptive protocol in response to a situation in the neighborhood near the school.

“We got word of a resident in the school community that was exhibiting some unpredictable behaviors,” he said. “In collaboration with OPD (Ogden Police Department) and as a precaution, we enacted our ‘secure protocol’ at the school.”

He said that, under the secure protocol, the school’s doors were secured so nobody could come into the building or leave. Operations inside the school continued as normal while officials kept in contact with OPD.

The secure protocol was lifted about 45 minutes after initially being called.

Bates said he had few details as to the full nature of the events taking place outside of the school.

“OPD was able to make direct contact with the individual in question and verified there was no need to continue the secure protocol,” he said.

When asked, Lt. Will Farr of the OPD said the department had no comment other than it was a precautionary step.

Bates said there is a major distinction between what happened within Wasatch Elementary School on Friday and lockdowns that have become an infamous safety protocol.

“We, along with many other school districts across the state and throughout the nation, made a change in our vernacular,” he said. “We used to use two very similar terms — ‘lockout’ and ‘lockdown.’ The challenge we found with that is, regardless of which of those you used, the only thing anybody everybody heard was lockdown. Lockdown is a much, much more severe and concerning situation versus a lockout.”

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