Educators and students all shrieked in terror when two juvenile mice were seen and caught in room 425 at school.

Sabrina Groth, ninth grade biology teacher, shares her experience of catching the mice in her room. Some students in her seventh period class spotted them first under the smartboard. When she set a trap down and came back the next day, she found them stuck on it.

“My first thought was, ‘Please be dead, please be dead, please be dead’…” Ms. Groth said. Although she isn’t deathly afraid of mice, she was still frustrated to find them in her room due to their disease-carrying tendencies and overall unhygienic presence. Since the mice were still babies, she inferred that the parent mice were still around. “I can smell the nest… it smells like sawdust,” she says. Ms. Groth kept the mice in her classroom for the remainder of the day until Tuesday morning, when she released them back outside.

The reason for how and why the mice got into her room was obvious to the teacher. “Kids didn’t listen and kept eating in my classroom,’” she said. “That led to my room having the most abundant food source, which led to the mice coming here.”

Because of eating in her class being the cause of the mice problem, she has prohibited any food consumption in her room.

One key takeaway she would like students to have from this experience is to be mindful of their messes in the future. “Stop eating in classrooms…and when you do, clean up after yourself,” Ms. Groth said.