Bear sighting leads to morning lockdown at Asheville High

Sam DeGrave | The Citizen-Times

ASHEVILLE — A bear roaming around A-B Tech's campus Tuesday led officials to briefly lock down Asheville High, the second day of classes for city schools students.

At about 8:10 a.m., Asheville High administrators got word that a bear had been spotted near A-B Tech's campus, which sits adjacent to that of Asheville High, according to Ashley-Michelle Thublin, a spokeswoman for Asheville City Schools.

"There was never any threat to any of our students," Thublin told the Citizen Times over the phone Tuesday afternoon.

School officials decided to call a perimeter lockdown — alerting anybody on campus to get inside a building — because students are dropped off for school along Victoria Road, a main road through A-B Tech that wraps around the back of Asheville High's campus.

The lockdown was lifted by 8:15 a.m. and didn't impact the school's schedules because classes don't start until 8:30 a.m. at Asheville High, Thublin said.

Though Tuesday was the first bear-induced lockdown of the 2018-2019 school year, school officials have called similar lockdowns at Asheville High and other ACS campuses before, Thublin said.

"It's just a part of living in the mountains," she said. "Our principals are pretty well versed in what to do when this happens."

On A-B Tech's campus, bear protocol is slightly different, according to college spokeswoman Kerri Glover.

"We don't lock down for bears," she said Tuesday. "We have so many bears. We see them on a pretty regular basis, and we alert people."

The college sends out what Glover calls "bear alerts" when they receive notice of a bear sighting. The alerts let students know where the animal is, and they also include a few handy do's and don'ts. Such as "don't approach or feed the bears," Glover said.

Tuesday's bear visit comes about one week after A-B Tech announced its new mascot — Trailblazer Bear.

The college announced on Aug. 20 that its new mascot, the Trailblazer, will be represented by a bear, after students decided on the animal based on its prevalence on campus.

"We have bears and groundhogs all over our campus so the students decided between the bears and the groundhogs, and the bears won," Glover said, joking that the decision left an unhappy contingent of groundhog fans on campus.

Last spring, a mama bear and two cubs were sighted on campus four or five times, Glover said, adding that she didn't know if Tuesday's bear visitor was related.

"They kept walking across the road and stopping traffic," she said. "This is just a part of them being displaced from their habitat."