Audubon Park Elementary School
From Omnictionary
Audubon Park Elementary School is a school in Orlando, Florida serving students from Kindergarten through fifth grade. Its prominent alumni include Jefferson Davies, Margo Roth Spiegelman, and the environmental technologist Hank Green.
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History
Audubon Park was built in the Audubon Park neighborhood of Orlando (so-called because all the streets are named for birds painted by John James Audubon) in 1953. The original building still stands today, although many trailers have been added to accomodate an increase in the student body, primarily precipitated by the building of the Jefferson Park subdivision on the site of the former Naval base adjacent to the school.
Student Body
There are currently 712 students enrolled at Audubon Park, although the Orange County Public School system has said that the ideal number of students would be 550.
Unexploded Ordnance
In May of 2001, three fourth grade Audubon Park students--Carli Lamon, Peter Geller, and Kayley Porter--were playing in Jefferson Park one day after school and began a digging project at the bottom of a drainage ditch that circumnavigates the park. Their announced intention was to dig the deepest hole in the world. When they had dug approximately two feet beneath the base of the ditch, they discovered a large mass of metal. Geller's father was eventually called to the scene, who dug around the object until it became obvious that it was missile-shaped, at which point he called the Fire Department. The unexploded but armed missile had apparently been left by the Navy.
The story was front page news in the Orlando Sentinel the following day, and an exhaustive investigation by Sentinel reporters combing the Jefferson Park's playgrounds and greenspace with high-powered metal detectors eventually discovered more than a hundred buried weapons, from rocket propelled grenades to loaded M-16 rifles.
The Navy has never accepted responsibility for the unexploded ordnance, claiming in its definitive statement that, "The buried weapons found by young residents of the Jefferson Park and the staff of the Orlando Sentinel were not placed there purposefully or accidentally by anyone acting under the official auspices of the United States Navy."
March 2006 Lockdown
On March 17, 2006, United States Government Officials shut down the school and immediate surrounding areas including Jefferson Park, blocking access without reason, citing only that necessary precautions were being taken to both insure the safety of the populace and protect national security during the length of the government operation. The United States Navy denied all allegations that the lock-down had any connection with the incident several years earlier, and a Navy spokesperson maintained that the Navy did not have "...situational awareness" of the lockdown. Of the dozen or so unmarked transport trucks brought in by the government during it's week long stay, it has been reported that ground penetrating radar was at least part of the cargo
