After Parkland, officials jump on school threats
At least nine area students arrested after threats at high schools.
The Feb. 14 killings of 17 people in Parkland, Florida, have ignited a wave of copycat threats, as happens after nearly every high-profile school shooting. Most prove unfounded, but cause big disruptions to schools while tying up local police and law enforcement across the country for hours or even days.
At least nine students — one each from Springfield, Ross, Middletown, Piqua, Lebanon, Little Miami, Dixie and two from Fairborn — have been arrested at area high schools since the Florida shooting.
Nationally, 15 students in one Florida school district are facing felony charges and prison time for making alleged threats since the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre.
Experts say authorities’ swift responses are underscoring a climate in which even idle threats will result in serious consequences.
“Kids make bad decisions, and I think that in decades past, those decisions would have been addressed behind closed doors with the principal and parents,”
said Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting company. “Now they’re being addressed behind closed doors in the police station and the courtroom.”
The Volusia County Schools system in east-central Florida isn’t taking chances. Sheriff Michael Chitwood made it clear he had a zero-tolerance policy as threats began after Parkland. On Thursday, he went further, saying students or their families would have to pay the costs of the investigations — at least $1,000 and sometimes much more.
District spokeswoman Nancy Wait said the message is clear: We’re not joking around.
“Unfortunately that word didn’t get to the students, and we started seeing more students making threats in the classroom, and that was frightening to their classmates,” she said. “Most of the time these students didn’t have access to weapons, but they were still making threats to shoot up their schools.”
Don Bridges, president of the National Association of School Resource Officers and a veteran of 16 years on duty at Franklin High School in suburban Baltimore, said the number of threats goes down when districts send a strong message that they won’t be tolerated.
The Educator’s School Safety Network, which tracks reports of school threats and violent incidents across the country, has documented a spike since Parkland. The Ohio group counted 797 as of Sunday. Most (743) were for threats of various kinds, including gun and bomb threats. The threats were made mostly via social media (331) and verbally (119).
That amounts to about a sevenfold increase in the usual rate, director of programs Amy Klinger said.
“The mentality has shifted in a very short period of time from kids being kids to this is very serious stuff,” she said. She expects consequences of post-Parkland threats to be harsher than before.
“They almost have to be,” she said. “Do we want to do this for the rest of the school year? Do we want to have this constant chaos and fear, and people being upset? How much learning is going on?”
In Warren County, Judge Joe Kirby has decided to continue the detention of two boys accused in threats at their schools. On Wednesday, Kirby ordered the 14- and 17-year-old boys to remain in the Warren County Detention Center, at least until they complete a polygraph test.
“Until I have that, I cannot take the chance and release him,” Kirby said in declining to free the 17-year-old Lebanon High boy.
In the Lebanon case, the student is charged with inducing panic by texting, “THAT’S IT IM GONNA SHOOT UP A SCHOOL I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE” to friends on Feb. 15.
The judge said he was not ready to free the boy, who insisted the threats were just a joke.
Tom Clark, a defense attorney in Santa Fe, New Mexico, represents a 14-year-old boy whose threat preceded Parkland but who faced tough consequences.
Clark said the boy had been having a bad day and wrote a list of people he wanted to shoot. After someone found the list in November, the boy, who had never been in trouble before, was jailed and faced hefty charges and a lifetime expulsion. He eventually was sentenced to probation.
“After the initial harsh reaction, at least the district attorney stepped back and the superintendent of schools stepped back and looked at it in a more compassionate light,” Clark said.
Probation officers worked with the boy to find an alternative program where he could go to school at night.
“No one wants to be the judge or the police officer or the security guard who doesn’t take action and something awful happens,” Clark said. “So the initial reactions are swift and harsh, and then ultimately people are able to get a better handle on what’s going on with these children individually.”
In Fairborn, the high school went on “level 2” lockdown on Feb. 22 after receiving a threat, meaning all exterior doors were secured and all students were sheltered in place with doors locked, according to the police report. One of the two students arrested is accused of standing up in class and naming off people he wanted to kill, according to a police report.
The incident with the 12-year-old boy happened, police said, at the same time an 11-year-old girl was separately placed into custody on suspicion of spreading a message on Snapchat indicating “Fairborn schools next” in the “shoot SHS” threat that spread across the region and into other parts of the country.
It’s not clear yet what the consequences will be for an autistic boy whose social media threat to shoot up Orono High School in suburban Minneapolis prompted a lockdown Feb. 21. Prosecutors won’t say what the charges are because it’s a juvenile case.
The community’s reaction was unusually sympathetic. Another student’s mother set up a GoFundMe campaign with the boy’s family’s permission that by Sunday was near its $40,000 goal to help cover the family’s legal and treatment expenses.
‘After the initial harsh reaction, at least the district attorney stepped back and the superintendent of schools stepped back and looked at it in a more compassionate light.’ Tom Clark Attorney for teen whose threat preceded Parkland