VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. – The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office is issuing a warning to parents after fentanyl was found at a county high school on Friday.
According to the sheriff’s office, the drug was found inside a baggie that was discovered by a student outside a restroom in Atlantic High School in Port Orange.
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The student turned in the bag to a teacher who alerted the school resource deputy, according to a post on the sheriff’s office’s social media. The deputy tested the powder in the bag which showed a presumptive positive for fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, the post said.
On Friday at Atlantic HS in Port Orange, a teacher asked the SRD for assistance with a small packet of unknown powder a student found on the floor near the senior locker bay restrooms. The SRD tested the powder, and observed a presumptive positive result for fentanyl. pic.twitter.com/UGiNO89696
— Volusia Sheriff (@VolusiaSheriff) September 13, 2022
According to the incident report, deputies have not yet been able to identify anyone who may have brought the drug into the school.
“What in the world are high school kids doing with fentanyl?” Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said. “Do they not realize that in Volusia County, we have over 300 overdose deaths a year for the past several years and ten times that amount of overdosing? And fentanyl is the key distributor in all that.”
Body camera video of the incident shows a deputy’s discovery of the fentanyl. In the video, a teacher tells the deputy a student found it on the floor near the restrooms and turned it in.
The teacher can be heard in the video saying the baggie “smells like gum,” and the deputy instructed him to place it in the deputy’s pocket, as the deputy refused to touch it.
“A kid picked it up, went to a teacher,” Chitwood said. “Teacher went to a deputy, and you say to yourself, ‘You know, at any point in time, just touching that is potentially deadly.’”
You can watch the body camera video by clicking on the media player below.
The sheriff’s office also posted about a separate incident at Pine Ridge High School in Deltona on Friday, in which a student brought a BB gun to school and showed the weapon during a fight.
Deputies said this student struggled with deputies when they went to search his backpack, where they found the BB gun made to look like a Glock.
“We’re not talking about a water pistol here. We’re talking about a gun that comes apart just like a Glock does,” Chitwood said. “When you look at that, you don’t wait until somebody fires it.”
According to Chitwood, bringing a weapon like that to school could have resulted in much worse consequences.
“I’m gonna tell you as a 35-year law enforcement person: if you point that at me, you’re getting shot...” Chitwood said. “If you pull that out in school, you’re going to create mass panic, and you’re going to see the response we saw before. And God knows what will happen with these mass panics. Anyone could get hurt.”
Chitwood asked parents to take more responsibility for checking what their children are bringing to school to avoid similar issues in the future.
“You’re a parent. You have every right to search your child’s backpack,” he said. “You have every right to search your child’s room. Don’t be their friend. Be their parent. See what’s going on in their school bag. Check their social media.”
Investigators said they arrested the student, who faces charges of campus disruption, resisting an officer with violence and battery on a law enforcement officer.
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