Five students at a Chattanooga high school were hospitalized on Wednesday with an illness that apparently stemmed from ingesting some sort of prescription medication, police and Hamilton County School officials said.

Chattanooga police Chief David Roddy said that, shortly after 10 a.m., his department received information from school resource officers at Brainerd High School who said they had several “children with concerning physical symptoms.”

Four students were transported from the school by ambulance and one by was taken from by personal vehicle to be treated at a local hospital for non life-threatening symptoms, Roddy said.

The chief did not elaborate on the students' symptoms but did say none of the students had overdosed.

"Those are all the questions that not only the Chattanooga Police Department but our partners with Hamilton County Sheriff's Office and our partners with the Drug Enforcement Administration have all responded in here today, to get to the bottom of what happened today and what placed these children in jeopardy.

Roddy said the department has leads on what the drugs were but would not elaborate.

The situation prompted officials to put the high school on lockdown mid-day Wednesday.

Students were being held despite a planned early dismissal as emergency personnel investigated the rash of sickness and school officials alerted parents immediately.

A student told the Times Free Press that they were kept in third block for nearly four hours.

"They had an email sent to the teachers. [My teacher] said there were drugs in the school somewhere, and I heard some police officers talk about how they found a bag of pills in the girls' bathroom," Roeland Bencosme, a ninth-grader at Brainerd said.

While Hamilton County dismissed schools early due to flooding in the area, dismissal at Brainerd was delayed while police investigated.

Chattanooga police said officers at the school on conducted a K-9 sweep of the schools "to make sure nothing was found to threaten the school".

Sarah Bencosme, Roland's mother, said the school sent a message later stating that no one was in immediate danger.

"We did get a second phone call letting us know it was nothing in the school making kids sick. That made me think it was maybe something kids brought into the school. Somebody poisoned someone or it was drug related or something like that," Bencosme told the Free Press.

Students were eventually dismissed at 12 p.m. CT. Hamilton County schools were closed Thursday due to weather conditions.