Hollister officials explain what led to false active shooter alert at Hollister High School

HOLLISTER, Calif - A lockdown occurred at Hollister High School Thursday During lunch, which was later classified as a false alarm, as Superintendent Dr. Shawn Tennenbaum explains, it was a program error.

Students and staff were quick to react as soon as they heard a lockdown was occurring on all the speakers at school, and school and law officials treated it as if it was real alert.

Della Clark, a health aid at Hollister High School, was in charge of a paralyzed student's safety.

"We called parents I told them she’s going to be fine I promise. I will try to keep her safe we did some prayers. I saw she can't run because she's paralyzed from the right side, I said, okay, we got it. We got to get to safety. So we went to the health office," Clark said.

Tennenbaum says the alarm blasting on the speakers was a mistake, and there was never a threat to students on campus.

"This was simply a programming error. It was a glitch in our system. In terms of taking a look at the cause factor, simply a program error or a human part, let's put it that way."

The Hollister Police Department said they responded to the call as if there was an active shooter. "We didn't know where the specific location of the shooter was. And that campus is enormous. Each one of our officers was proactively taking different portions of the campus and immediately getting out on foot and trying to isolate where the incident was occurring," Bo Leland, a police sergeant at the Hollister Police Department said."

Around 17 officers responded in less than 10 minutes.

"I think law enforcement nationally has learned lessons from delaying response in any way. So we will not we won't mess around with that," Leland said. "We learn from every situation that happens on campus. You know, this is a great opportunity for our school community to improve all of our policies, protocols, and procedures," Tennenbaum said.