A Texas school seems to have a furmidable problem.
McCallum High School in Austin has been facing a raccoon issue, with the furry omnivores appearing across the campus and one tumbling down through a ceiling during a class, NBC affiliate KXAN reported.
“It was scared, it was running around and everything,” journalism student Morgan Eye told the station of the raccoon that fell from overhead and landed near a student. “What if it bit her? What if it had rabies?”
Raccoons are not a new issue for the school, another student said.
“There are articles you can find from the ’90s, from the early 2000s — and even the 2010s — talking about this,” said Noah Braun, a sophomore, who reported in the school’s paper last month that three raccoons were captured within an hour.
Braun said a dead raccoon was recently discovered in the school’s walls.
“It was rotting,” Braun said. “Its corpse was rotting and it was spreading its smell everywhere”
Student Max Davis shared videos and pictures of the raccoons.
“There was a raccoon that ran out of a bathroom and when it saw people it ran the other way,” Davis said.
The Austin Independent School District addressed the concerns 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.
School district employees and contractors were setting “humane traps” and performing “exclusion work,” the district added.
“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 school district promised.
Though active at night, raccoons that surface during the daytime aren’t necessarily dangerous unless they exhibit alarming behavior, such as bodily discharge or self-mutilation, according to the Humane Society of the United States. They’re a carrier of the rabies virus, which makes them a “rabies vector species” worthy of caution, the society adds.