“We would hear footsteps ... We were really scared, but we were all trying not to show it,” she said. “My teacher told our class that he would step in front of the person and let us all leave” if it came to that.

“We were scared that something was going to happen to us, like at Sandy Hook,” she said, referring to the 2012 school massacre in Connecticut.

Outside, Caroline’s father, Jeff Goff, was trying to figure out what was going on as police set up a perimeter. He said he noticed a media cameraman setting up outside the school immediately after the lockdown started, and wondered momentarily how the cameraman had managed to get there so quickly.

When rumors about KSDK’s role began circulating he called the station.

“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me, do you know what you just put us through? There’s a guy [a police officer] with an automatic rifle standing in front of the school!’ ”

Officials at elementary schools in the Francis Howell and Parkway school districts reported similar visits from a KSDK reporter on Thursday.