Parents responded to this morning’s bomb scare by removing their children from Lawrence schools – some critcizing school officials for not doing more to alert them to the situation.

At Schwegler School, several parents arrived before 10 a.m. to retrieve children.

“You never know,” said Pam Montgomery, as she and her daughter, Amanda, a fifth-grader, prepared to leave.

“I was in the nurse’s office and little kids said they were scared,” Amanda said.

Her mother said she had heard through a friend about the threats.

“I’m going to go pick my son up at South (Junior High),” Pam Montgomery said. “We are just going to go home and hang out.”

Jeff Felmlee was loading his fourth-grader and first-grader into his van.

“I decided, even though I don’t think the threat is real here at Schwegler, that I had to pull my kids out for safety reasons,” he said. “As we’ve seen across the nation, you can’t really predict when a school is safe and when it’s not.”

Sonia Arb was picking up her son, Dalton Hurt, 8, a second-grader.

“My daughter called me, and they heard there was a bomb threat at the school, but they didn’t say which one,” Arb said.

“Where’s the bomb going to be?” Dalton asked his mother.

“We don’t know,” she responded. “We’re just being safe.”

At Broken Arrow school, Pam Barker was volunteering at her son’s second-grade class when she learned of the threat. She pulled her son and left.

“I just think I feel more comfortable taking him home,” she said.

When Michelle Jaimez heard about the bomb threats to area schools, her first instinct was to go to West Junior High School to pick up her ninth-grade son.

“I fully expected when I got there to find all the doors locked and the security guard at the front entrance,” Jaimez said.

But that wasn’t what she encountered.

Jaimez said she saw two students in a photography class taking pictures of each other outside the building. When she went to the office, she said, the receptionist questioned why she would take her student out of school because the threat was not at a single school.

Jaimez said she would just be more comfortable with her son at home. When Jaimez talked to her son, he had no idea that anything was wrong.

At Hillcrest Elementary School late this morning, Michele Rogers was standing on the front walkway to get her son, Caelan, 8, a third-grader, and her daughter, Sophia, 6, a kindergarten student.

“It’s probably nothing, but you don’t want to take chances with your babies,” Rogers said. “I think about those poor parents at Virginia Tech, and the fact that they sent their kids to school thinking it was safe.”

Rogers said she was concerned about her son being a portable classroom at Hillcrest. She also planned to go Deerfield Elementary to get her nephews, ages 5 and 9.

Chris Bell, whose daughter, Kristen, is an eighth-grader at Southwest Junior High School, said students at the school were told they could not use their cell phones in class, but could go to the restroom to phone someone to come pick them up.

“What’s the difference of calling in the class or calling in the restroom? Let them go home,” Bell said. “The teachers were concerned enough to send them to the restroom.”

Bell said all three of his children have been brought home from school. The other two were at Hillcrest Elementary School.

“As a parent I’m concerned about what’s going on, but we can’t give in to the fear of these type things,” Bell said. “It tears you up inside as a parent.”

“All of our schools are implementing their emergency procedure plans,” Superintendent Randy Weseman said about 11:15 a.m. “The schools are secure. We are working with a centralized team in Douglas County and with the police.”

Weseman said the police “are making progress on the issue,” but he couldn’t provide any specific information.

Told of complaints by some parents that schools have not done enough to inform parents this morning, Weseman said he has been relying on news media coverage.

“We have been trying to get information out as best as we can,” Weseman said. “Some parents have picked up kids. But we are securing our situation to make sure kids are secure.”

He said emergency personnel have been updating the news media this morning about every 10 minutes.

“We don’t have the capability to make a phone call to every parent,” Weseman said. “If we have positive identification and parents come in and sign their children out, that’s fine. In some cases, that’s pretty active. In other schools, there’s not that much traffic with it.”

He said parents have different opinions about what they should do.

“We’re just following our plan and the Douglas County Emergency plan,” he said. “The schools are secure. They’re safe. There has not been an incident. We’re working with the police and we’re following the police’s advice.”

He said they decided not to cancel classes.

“There were two threats,” he said. “It’s not just specifically a bomb threat. That threat changed to where if you start releasing and put kids out, you actually could be playing in to luring them outside of the school. You have to make some judgments. . . . It wasn’t that specific, but it talked about in some cases a shooting. And that could be outside of the school. We locked down our schools, we have secured them. We followed our plan. We’ve followed the suggestions of the police.”