Raccoon falls through ceiling during class after pests invade Texas high school
A group of furry wannabe students has started invading classes at a Texas high school — with some even crashing through the ceiling.
A growing number of raccoons have been spotted lurking through the hallways into classrooms of McCallum High School in Austin and at least three have fallen through the ancient building’s ceiling panels, some of the school’s students told KXAN.
The creatures have been slinking through the halls for years, though there has been a noticeable uptick.
“There are articles you can find from the ’90s, from the early 2000s — and even the 2010s — talking about this,” said sophomore Noah Braun, who wrote about the issue in the school’s paper last month.
One day, three different raccoons were spotted in under an hour.
Two of the pests managed to contaminate several classrooms with their unhygienic bodily fluids, according to the student publication.
Fellow journalism student Morgan Eye has also been tracking the increase in furry forest creatures creeping through the building.
“Six catches and releases all in the span of three days is the most we have ever seen here at school,” Eye said.
During one critter spotting last month, Braun reported that the school’s assistant principal and campus officer had to corner a raccoon underneath a stool before coaxing it out of the building.
The student journalist told KXAN last week that he more recently heard a concerning noise outside his classroom, and when he left to go outside there was a raccoon.
“There was a raccoon that was getting sort of pinned up against that door by the officer and eventually he was able to get it out of the building,” Braun said.
Students have begun sharing snapshots and clips of the creatures creeping around the school’s hallways online. Braun said they even recently discovered a dead raccoon inside the school’s walls.
“It was rotting,” Braun said. “Its corpse was rotting and it was spreading its smell everywhere”
There was also apparently a close encounter between a raccoon and a student, according to Eye, who said a raccoon fell through the ceiling inside a classroom and landed near a student.
“It was scared, it was running around and everything,” Eye said. “What if it bit her? What if it had rabies?”
Campus safety monitor Bob Bedard told the school newspaper the squirrels would likely soon be back “because this school’s like a sponge; there’s holes everywhere. There’s squirrels and rats and other things; it’s a 70-year-old building.”
Bedard theorized that during the pandemic a crippled mother raccoon had several babies inside the school.
“I think the ones we saw today were grown-up raccoons that grew up at McCallum. They’re true McCallum raccoons.”
The Austin Independent School District addressed the hairy situation in a statement to KXAN.
“We understand that having raccoons on school grounds can be worrying for parents, and we take this matter seriously,” the district said, noting that they want to address the issue in a “humane and effective manner.”
The district has contacted its Pest Management Department, a professional wildlife removal specialist, who has begun working to prevent raccoons from coming into the building, as well as seeing humane traps for others inside the building.
“The team will safely remove the raccoons from the school grounds and will continue to monitor the situation to ensure that the problem is fully resolved,” the district said.
