One Tuesday this past spring, my son called me at work to say he was worried.
Someone had scrawled graffiti on a boys restroom wall, threatening to come to his high school and shoot some kids. Rumors were swirling on social media, and other kids’ parents were rushing to the school to bring them home.
I tried to think of what I should say. After he told me that police were there, checking things out, I chose to believe that even if this threat was genuine, the presence of officers would deter anyone wanting to turn his suburban East Bay school into the next Columbine.
School and police officials determined that there was no danger, but the rumor mill kept many kids away from school the next day. Even more concerning: This would just be the first of four “unfounded” shooting or bomb threats to hit my son’s school over the next half year, disrupting class, leading to two evacuations and feeding an environment of fear, confusion and aggravation.
The Oct. 1 shooting deaths of nine students at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, prompted President Barack Obama to lament how routine such mass shootings have become in America. But I’ve since learned what’s become even more routine: threats to shoot up or bomb American K-12 campuses, with most of these threats turning out to be hoaxes.
It hasn’t been a problem just at my son’s school in Walnut Creek, but at K-12 campuses in the Bay Area and nationally, including Danville, Pleasanton, Brentwood and San Jose. In September, bomb threats put 11 San Diego high schools alone into lockdown.
“We’re dealing with a nationwide epidemic of school threats,” says Kenneth Trump, a Cleveland-based expert on school security. In looking at 812 threats at K-12 schools across the country from Aug. 1 to Dec. 31 2014, he determined that threats were up 158 percent from the previous year. About 70 percent target high schools, and a growing number come via social media and trendy new apps such as Yik Yak and Whisper.
Credible or not, all threats have to be investigated and taken seriously, Trump says.
“Hundreds of schools are losing classroom teaching time, police are wasting resources, children are frightened, and parents are angry and alarmed,” he says.
The threat at my son’s school the day after the Roseburg shooting was quickly dismissed as “not credible” because of the place and manner in which it was written. Even though the school shared this information with parents via email by the middle of the day, there was still a mass exodus. I heard a mom say she had brought her son home because “any threat is a credible threat.”
A couple of police officers, who have had to handle at least five threats at two of the local high schools in their city over the past year, told me “it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
Trump sympathizes, noting that authorities walk a tightrope. While nine out of every 10 threats turn out to be unfounded, he says, “no school administrator wants to be number 10.” Meanwhile, he’s encountered superintendents and principals who have been chastised by school boards for not ordering immediate evacuations or shutting schools down.
On the day of the post-Roseburg threat, my son was one of the students who wanted to leave school early, even though he knew it was bogus. He was just fed up, because, once again, someone thought it would be funny — or something — to disrupt school and waste everyone’s time.
Maybe pressure from ticked-off peers will deter the next idiot. Or maybe the would-be threatener will be deterred by steps the school has instituted to keep track of students who are out of class, thereby reducing opportunities for writing threats on school walls. Of course, the school can’t do anything to stop kids from posting threats on social media, nor can it do anything about the larger culture of fear we live in.
As parents, though, I think we should refrain from hitting the panic button when our kids call from school to say, “Come get me.” We should take our cue from authorities, who in this era, are having to beef up their threat assessment practices and strategies for communicating with parents.
I know of parents who won’t be reassured by research that says mass shooters usually don’t issue direct threats to their intended victims or that school shootings, though tragic and massively covered, are still statistically rare events, with the chance of a student being harmed or killed at school about 1 in 1 million, according to David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. And, yes, I know that for some parents, even a 1 in 1 million chance is too high, even at the cost of constant school disruption.
Still, while it’s understandable for everyone involved to want to do something — anything — to make sure their kids are safe, rushing to close down schools or bring kids home usually isn’t the answer, Trump says. In the long run, it won’t make anyone safer, and it won’t make anyone feel more safe. And it definitely won’t stem the epidemic of false threats. It will just give the next idiot an incentive to wreak havoc.
