A 14-year-old boy charged last week with bringing flammable liquids to an Evanston middle school with a written plan to burn a neighbor’s garbage can awaits a hearing in juvenile court, police said Wednesday.

Police have closed investigation of the March 22 incident, which led to the evacuation of Chute Middle School, 1400 Oakton St., said Chief Frank Kaminski of Evanston Police Department.

School officials called police at about 12:30 p.m. on March 22 after a student told the lunchroom supervisor that the 14-year-old had the liquids and the plan in his backpack, Kaminski said.

The 14-year-old showed other students the contents of the backpack, Kaminski said.

Students were put on buses and police brought dogs to sniff the area, said Hecky Powell, acting president of the Evanston/Skokie District 65 School Board.

Police confiscated the backpack and arrested the student, Kaminski said. The student’s name is not being released because he is a minor.

School officials suspended the student, he said.

The administration at Chute referred all questions to District 65 communication director Jan Roy, who could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Police recovered a “small quantity” of flammable liquids from the student’s backpack, Kaminski said. For safety reasons, he declined to give further information about what liquids police found.

“We don’t want to give anybody any ideas,” he said.

The student’s plan, which called for lighting his neighbor’s garbage can on fire and putting the liquids along the grass to start a trail of fire, was based on part of a 2003 action movie, Kaminski said.

“It was like the movie ‘Daredevil,’ where they make symbols with fire,” he said.

The boy and his friends knocked over the neighbor’s garbage can last week and were angry because the neighbor had told them to clean the mess up, Kaminski said.

The incident was handled well by police but is still a concern for District 65, Powell said Wednesday.

“I have never heard of anything like this,” said Powell, who has served on the school board for four years. “It’s a scary thing. It’s a scary thought.”

This school year has been very unusual for District 65 in terms of criminal activity, Powell said.

Since September, police have made arrests in at least three other incidents involving district employees and officials.

In January, a janitor at Kingsley Elementary School, 2300 Green Bay Road, was charged with leaving a loaded gun in a school bathroom, where it was found by a 7-year-old student.

The janitor is scheduled to appear in court April 26.

A custodian at Lincolnwood Elementary School, 2600 Colfax St., was arrested in October and charged with selling crack and powder cocaine on school grounds. He was sentenced in February to a minimum of one year in prison.

In September, the president of the District 65 teachers union was charged with arranging to meet an undercover officer he thought was a teenage boy.

He pleaded guilty in March and was sentenced to probation for indecent solicitation of a child.

“This has been a heck of a year for us,” Powell said.

Reach Marissa Conrad at [email protected]