Sophomore Sage Stoakley was in the middle of a Secret Garden rehearsal when a raccoon fell through the ceiling in the Fine Arts Center. Stoakley and several other students ran out into the lobby to see a hole in the roof and the raccoon running around.

“It was really scary,” Stoakley said. “It looked dangerous or maybe like it was infected with something because it was really angry. It was just running around in [the] hallway.”

While Stoakley stepped back inside the theater, other students corralled the raccoon and chased it outside the doors. With no teachers nearby, the small group of students were the only ones who saw the raccoon, and they chased it out of the building themselves.

“I stayed inside,” she said. “It was scary. I didn’t know our school had that bad of a pest problem.”

Several days later, the students in the Fine Arts Center had another encounter with raccoons. In the band hall, a student jumped to touch a square of the ceiling, which caused it to fall down. Students then saw three new raccoons in the ceiling. Sophomore Damian Segovia was there when animal control came to capture them.

“It took a really long time to catch the first one,” Segovia said. “They had to put trash around to lure them. Then after the first one, they caught the rest of them pretty quickly.”

A few days later, a fifth raccoon appeared in the Fine Arts Center. This time, it was trapped in a cage in the lobby when the steel drum students arrived early for practice one morning.

“Some kids thought it was a prank from LBJ because it happened right before the game,” Segovia said, but he disagrees. “I don’t think it was them. I don’t know how the raccoons got in, though.”

The incidents with raccoons in the school have been recurring for years, librarian Jane Farmer said. In the last three years, people have been able to hear pests in the ceiling. When Shelley Pittman was the principal years ago, assistant librarian June Bloch entered the room one morning to find Pittman chasing raccoons in the library until he finally got them out the back door.

“One raccoon came in and knocked all the books off the shelves in the back of the library,” Bloch said. “Everything was knocked down. It was funny to see the principal running around.”

Head custodian Hubert Clayton said once the raccoons fall through the ceiling, they often bump into glass windows and doors trying to escape.

“They have a pretty heavy weight, so they just fall down through the ceiling tiles,” he said. “Then they smell the air outside and head straight for the glass.”

Two years ago, a similar incident occurred in the library when another raccoon fell through the ceiling, this time into the conference room, leaving the room a mess.

“It fell in over the weekend and couldn’t get back out, so it wreaked havoc in the conference room,” Farmer said. “It was really messy. The room had to be repainted and get new carpet and everything.”

Pest control then came to trap the raccoon and set additional traps in the ceiling. According to Clayton, the pest control worker who came to collect a cage had a surprise close-up encounter.

“Raccoons usually travel in pairs with their mates,” he said. “When the pest control worker reached in to get the cage, his mate was sitting right there. He had to grab that one and hold it to get it down to another cage before he could pick up the other one.”

A picture of the raccoon that fell in the conference room, dubbed “Rocky” by the librarians, is still hanging on the conference room door. Recently, raccoon troubles have returned to the library.

“This fall, we’ve heard the skittering of raccoons in the ceiling, and a few holes have appeared,” Farmer said. “We’re really strict about our no food or drink policy, and one of the reasons is that we don’t want to attract any raccoons. We’re also worried about rats and roaches, too. We don’t let anyone eat in here unless an adult is supervising the group.“

Though she said the raccoons are a safety concern and a problem that may not have an easy solution, Farmer said she does see a comical side to the situation.

“There is some humor in the fact that we have raccoons living in the building,” she said, “but I don’t know if there are easy answers. It’s an old building, and who knows what all is up there? I don’t know what it would cost to have a really heavy campaign against them. It might be totally unreasonable.”

Building manager Mary Noack also had a run-in with the raccoons.

“I was up here working late one night in my office, which used to be where the copier room is now, and I could hear them running,” Noack said. “I was afraid the raccoon was going to fall down into [my office] because I could see the ceiling tiles [bouncing], so I got a broom handle and tried to poke the ceiling tiles to make him run away. Unbeknownst to me, there was a [wall] right above the ceiling tiles and I pinned him in a corner, where he got really scared.”

Another time, Noack said, a raccoon went running down the main hallway.

“Our head custodian, Hubert, is afraid of raccoons,” Noack said. “One raccoon came into the building by the windows before you get to the English hall looking out over the front lawn. He climbed up those wood posts onto the window and couldn’t get any further, and Hubert, being scared to death, pushed one of those big blue recycling bins down there. I got a board and we pushed him until he fell into the recycling bin and shut the lid. We turned around for a second and he jumped, hit the lid, and came right back out of that blue can and went running down the hallway. Fortunately, somebody had the door open in the English wing and the raccoon went running out.”

Noack said she thinks the raccoons are getting in through the foundation of the school.

“This building is so old that there are places around the school where they can get in,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know that the school was built in the ‘50s and under the building is a bomb shelter. You can actually go out down the stairs by the science wing, and there are two big doors that open up and you can walk all under the building. So there are ways the raccoons can get in.”

Attempts have been made to control the raccoons, Noack said. When people hear the raccoons, animal control comes
out to trap them. A few years ago, animal control tried to go around the edges of the school and make sure there were no holes, but the raccoons continued to get in.

“I guess they could just dig a hole and get in that way, too,” Noack said. “Interestingly enough, they get in the old fine arts building quite frequently. It’s just very interesting how they come to visit.”

Clayton said he has seen nine raccoons loose in the building since he started working.

“I’ve seen them in the library, in the science hallway where the art rooms used to be, the English hallway, the Fine Arts Building and the theater,” he said. “They come and go depending on when it gets cold or they need shelter. I think they’re cute when they’re far away from the building, but close up they are very dangerous. They could jump on you and bite you or scratch you up. I always tell students to stay away until the pest control comes. I’m very afraid of them because you don’t know what they could do. You just have to stay away from them.”

This story was originally published in The Shield on Dec. 14, 2012.