A 14-year-old boy held 29 students and a teacher at gunpoint in a West Virginia high school classroom on Tuesday afternoon before he released them after negotiations and surrendered, authorities said. No injuries were reported. The student took a pistol into a second-floor classroom at Philip Barbour high school in the north-central part of the state, Lt Michael Baylous, of the state police, said. It was the ninth day of the new school year in Philippi, a town with a population of 3000 about 185km (115 miles) south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Barbour county schools superintendent, Jeffrey Woofter, credited the teacher for maintaining control when classes were about to change and praised the Philippi police chief for talking the suspect into giving up. Woofter said the teacher talked the boy into not allowing the next group of students to enter the classroom. “The teacher did a miraculous job, calming the student, maintaining order in the class,” Woofter said. He did not give the teacher’s name. Students who opened the door to enter for the next class were asked to leave. They then went across the hall to tell another teacher, who alerted school officials. An assistant principal raced to the hallway outside the classroom and called the office asking that police be alerted, Woofter said. Kayla Smith, a 17-year-old senior, said that at first no one in her classroom in another area of the school took a “code red” warning seriously.
