Some Woodland Primary School students were startled Tuesday afternoon when a technical oversight caused an odd message to play over the school’s loudspeakers.
A not-so-friendly voice identified itself to kindergartners and first-graders as Humoctopus, who claimed to have come from the future to take over the planet and “smash all humans,” said Woodland Public Schools spokesman Eric Jacobson.
The message was intended to be a joke, unintentionally left by the creators of software that the school district uses for its facilities, Jacobson said.
The software is called InformaCast, a notification system that allows administrators to send messages to connected buildings. Woodland Primary, Woodland High School and a bus depot are currently hooked up to the system.
It’s widely used by schools and retail stores such as Petco and Safeway.
Staffers with the district’s IT department were testing a connection at the bus depot Tuesday about 2 p.m. InformaCast gave “test message” as an option, something the staffers hadn’t used before. A week earlier, they had been testing the system for Woodland Primary, and unknown to them, the connection was still active.
When they tested the connection Tuesday, it went out to the bus depot and to classrooms with young students.
Without knowing the origin of the message, the school went into lockout and then into lockdown. The former is when the school’s front doors are locked, while the latter includes locking the exterior doors as well as classrooms.
Scott Landrigan, the school district’s director of facilities and safety, called local police. But he learned what had happened through the IT department within five minutes, and the school quickly lifted its lockdown status, Jacobson said.
As the school day returned to its daily routine, teachers explained to kids what happened.
“(They) talked to any students who were upset by this,” Jacobson said. “These are young kids.”
The school district penned a letter explaining the incident. Woodland Primary Principal Ingrid Colvard also recorded a voice message sent out to parents.
To prevent something similar from happening in the future, staff deleted all preloaded test messages from the system. Now, a single option is available: “This is a test of the announcement system,” Jacobson said.
Singlewire, the company behind InformaCast, told the school district it was “removing all vestiges of the test messages from the system to prevent something like this from happening again,” Jacobson said.
