Five drug-sniffing dogs and their handlers swept Wiscasset High School in an unannounced check for illicit narcotics at around 9:30 a.m. on Nov. 26, according to Wiscasset Police Chief Troy Cline.
The teams came from the Lincoln County and Kennebec County Sheriff Offices, and the Ellsworth, Old Orchard Beach, and Portland Police Dept., Cline said.
The sweep, which took about 90 minutes, covered the school building, the parking lot, and the alternative education building across the street.
Cline said he had previous discussions with the high school’s principal, Deb Taylor, about doing such a sweep, but the opportunity came up suddenly.
The teams are mandated to do a certain amount of training every month, and when a school scheduled to have a sweep canceled the morning of Nov. 26, they called Cline to see if he wanted to participate, Cline said.
Taylor said she had spoken last week with the RSU 12 Interim Supt. Alan Hawkins about doing a narcotics sweep, and it was already on her calendar to call Cline on Nov. 26 to tell him it was okay to set it up.
Cline called her first, and she checked in again with Hawkins before giving the go-ahead, Taylor said.
There are protocols for doing sweeps in schools, such as students must remain in their classrooms and instruction can’t be interrupted, Taylor said.
“Sometimes [the dogs] get a little loud, they get a little excited,” and the kids definitely know the dogs are present, Taylor said.
“There is a lesser threshold for school personnel than law enforcement” in conducting searches, Taylor said. Though they don’t do searches very often, they usually result from a teacher seeing, smelling, hearing indications of rule breaking or criminal behavior, she said.
The student is typically present whenever the school has to search a locker, Taylor said.
The school follows a standard of reasonableness, and weighs students expectation of privacy against the school’s goal of providing a safe learning environment, she said.
Some of the teams checked both the top and bottom lockers in the school’s hallways, Cline said. The dogs “stand on their hind legs; they stand up and sniff the locker,” he said.
Nothing was found in the search, “which is good, that’s what we want,” Taylor said.
The sweep benefited the K-9 units with the opportunity to work their dogs, and was a chance “for us to get into the school to show we’re proactive and we’re going to stop that kind of activity in the school as best we can,” Cline said.