A 15-year-old student at West Orange High School was shot on Wednesday afternoon and the 17-year-old suspected gunman is in custody, the Sheriff's Office confirmed.
According to Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings, the shooting was called in about 1:24 p.m. The school's resource deputy initiated active-shooter protocols, Demings said.
"It appears that it was at least two rounds fired" and the victim was struck twice, "somewhere in the face and somewhere in the abdomen," he said.
Douglas Szcinski, principal at WOHS, said in a Facebook post about 2 p.m. that the school was on lockdown and officials were "following all safety procedures and precautions."
"There has been an incident in which one student was shot," Szcinski said. "That student is alert and is being transported to the hospital. Law enforcement is on the scene working the situation."
Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Ginette Rodriguez said all students who remained on the WOHS campus were being bused to Ocoee High School for pick-up.
The victim was taken to Orlando Regional Medical Center, and was in stable condition and expected to survive.
"That student is going to be OK, from all indications," said schools Superintendent Barbara Jenkins.
Added School Board Chairman Bill Sublette, of the law enforcement response to the gunfire: "From what I know of the situation, their response was textbook perfect."
West Orange High student Kaitlyn Hawkins, 16, said she was about 50 feet away from the shooting in the bus loop.
She recognized the shooter as a boy who had been suspended from school but she didn't know his name.
Before the gunfire, the suspended boy punched the other boy twice in the face, she said.
"They were fighting, over what I don't know... It's very sad," Kaitlyn said.
Freshman Austin Nornhold, 16, was also in the loop when the fight broke out. He said he didn't think it was a "real fight" until the attacker reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun.
"I hear about this happening it at other schools, but I expected it to happen at a place with a lot worse reputation than here," Austin said.
Another West Orange student said that the shooting happened after a fight broke out between students near the bus loop as the school day came to an end.
The student said he didn't hear the shot, but saw the victim lying on the ground twitching. He described the scene as chaotic, with authorities scrambling to find the shooter.
"Our prayers and thoughts are with the victim and his family. No parent ever wants to be in that situation, where they send their kid to school and have them be shot," said Sublette.
The shooting comes two months after two students, one of them a football player, were shot outside Agape Christian Academy, a Christian school in Pine Hills.
That shooting also followed a fight shortly after classes were dismissed for the day. The argument apparently stemmed from an ongoing dispute involving a student, officials said.
West Orange, like the district's other traditional high schools, has two full-time deputies on its campus.
After students at three schools were found with guns earlier this year, the Orange County school district announced in May that it would conduct random weapons searches with metal detectors during the last weeks of the 2012-13 school year.
Those screenings -- done on all students at the selected schools -- have continued this school year, Sublette said.
That May decision followed four separate incidents at Colonial High and Glenridge and Lee Middle schools. No one was injured in those separate cases, but at all three schools students were found with guns.
At Glenridge, two months after one student was arrested for having guns in his backpack, authorities also found a loaded .22-caliber magazine in the garbage and received a message about a planned shooting rampage
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McClatchy-Tribune News Service
