C. Bradford Burgett, a senior at Middleburgh High School, said he drove to school on Monday. Mr. Burgett said that he saw one car that had gone off the road on State Route 145, and that an ambulance responded to the scene. Burgett said that the roads were slippery, and that a driver's experience and vehicle type made a lot of difference in terms of danger Monday morning. A one or two-hour delay would have been very beneficial that morning, said Mr. Burgett.
On Thursday, the opening of Middleburgh Schools was delayed two hours. Mr. Ingraham said there were multiple accidents in the area Thursday morning, and that the buses had just started out at their normal times when they were called back. Mr. Morse said that the buses start out between 6:15 and 6:30 A.M., and that he made the decision to delay school Thursday at around 6:15 A.M. The buses had no problems getting through Thursday morning, he said.
According to the December 3 letter to parents, students "who had been in the two classrooms where the letter had been" were held in school after the 12:15 P.M. dismissal. Whitney Brown, a seventh-grader in the middle school, confirmed that she was detained until approximately 1:30 P.M. Another seventh-grader, Laura Reinhart, said that the students saw the envelope, and were told not to touch anything in the classroom after the letter was deemed suspicious. The Press has learned from one seventh-grader that students in her detained class were made to wash their hands and faces, but were not made to take showers at the school.. According to Miss Brown, as of December 4, she and her classmates had been given no additional specific information about the incident from the district that might be pertinent to them. None of the seventh-graders interviewed by the Press said that they saw powder accompanying the envelope.
Some students in the high school were not happy with the way the school district handled the situation on Friday. Eleventh-grader Chris Becker said that the students should have been given more information about the situation. Tom Loucks, also an eleventh-grader, told the Press that students should have been let out of school earlier on Friday. Another eleventh-grader, DareRick Krufchinski, said the district told his father that DareRick's little brother would be sent home on the bus Friday. His brother was in fact detained past the 12:15 P.M. dismissal, and let out of school that afternoon without parental notification. Krufchinski said that he had to tell his father what happened to his younger brother since the district did not, and said that the situation was not handled well.
