Threat charges climb in schools

Surge follows a shift in response to safety concerns

A student texts a list of classmates’ names with threatening comments to a friend. Another points a banana at a classmate and says “bang.” A teen tells a group of bullies he will kill them if they don’t leave him alone. A fourth posts a picture to Snapchat with a gun, warning kids not to go to school the next day.

Which of those actions poses an imminent threat? Which are kids blowing off steam with poor judgment? Should any be prosecuted?

In the months after a 19year-old gunman killed 17 at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and a 17-year-old killed 10 in Galveston County’s Santa Fe High School, law enforcement officers and prosecutors have been flooded with calls about students making threats.

The number of those 18 and younger who have been charged with making terroristic threats in Harris County nearly quadrupled to 310 through October of this year, from 88 in 2017. The charges do not specify who the accused threatened.

Over the same time periods, those 18 and younger charged with threatening to exhibit or use a firearm on school proper-

ty nearly doubled, to 64 from 34.

Harris County Assistant District Attorney John Jordan, chief of the office’s juvenile division, said between the Feb. 14 Parkland shooting and the end of the 2017-18 school year, his office charged 216 students 16 and younger with third-degree felonies or class A misdemeanors for making threats against schools or brandishing weapons. He attributed that to a combination of factors.

“It’s on everyone’s mind, immature adolescents say things to get attention and, before they know it, they’re thrown into the criminal justice system. Administrators and other students are taking every threat seriously, as they should,” Jordan said. “It’s like a perfect storm.”

The picture looks similar statewide.

The Texas Juvenile Justice Department saw a 156 percent increase in referrals for students making terroristic threats, and a 600 percent increase in referrals for the exhibition or threat of exhibiting firearms, compared to the first five months in 2016 and 2017, according to a report by Texas Appleseed, Disability Rights Texas, the Earl Carl Institute and the Texas Children’s Defense Fund.

In Galveston County, conversations about school-based threats carry extra weight. Parents in Santa Fe ISD have lambasted school officials there for ignoring signs from the 17year-old who blasted his way through the school on May 18. The student’s trench coat and his increasingly odd behavior, they say, should have been cause for intervention.

Kevin Petroff, first assistant district attorney for the Galveston County District Attorney, said the pressure to catch potentially violent students has school leaders on edge. A school district police officer once called him to ask what to do with an 11 year old who told classmates his pencils were bombs. Petroff and the officer decided against taking any legal action, opting instead to leave discipline to school administrators.

“There are plenty of times where law enforcement will call us in agreement that this doesn’t rise to the level of a charge,” Petroff said. “The problem, as we’ve seen, is you just never know. I think Santa Fe was a good example of that.”

Judging threats

As the national media shined a spotlight on the horror of the Stoneman Douglas massacre in Parkland, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD General Counsel Marney Collins Sims began thinking of ways schools in the northwest Houston suburb could stop mass shooters before they opened fire on campus.

Counselors, school psychologists and social workers in Texas’ third largest school district already were being trained in basic methods to prevent and intervene in school-based violence, but Sims and Director of Psychology Services Traci Schluter wondered what more they could do. They found some schools across the country had created “threat-assessment teams” to analyze potential threats, determine whether they placed students in imminent danger and helped school officials coordinate responses, ranging from arrest to providing troubled students with more counseling support.

Originally used by the Secret Service to categorize threats made against presidents, the guidelines were revamped with the help of the FBI to focus on adolescent behavior. Their use in schools grew as more mass shootings shocked educators into action. After the Santa Fe shooting, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas School Safety Center to partner with SIGMA Threat Management Associates to train school personnel statewide on behavioral threat assessments and suggested districts create teams to look into threats.

There are several models of school-based threat assessment teams, but many operate in similar ways. They often are comprised of school counselors, licensed clinical psychologists, school resource officers, school administrators and teachers. When administrators or schoolbased police officers learn of a threat, the team meets to determine what steps to take next.

Cy-Fair ISD officials hope to debut teams trained in the Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines by the end of this school year. Under that model, school officials interview the intended victim, the person who made the threat and any witnesses. They attempt to determine whether the threat reflects actual intent to harm others: Was it a joke or made in a heated moment? Does the student offer an explanation or apology, retracting the threat and assuring school staff there was no harm intended? In those cases, school officials may be more likely to offer additional counseling and school-based discipline instead of getting law enforcement involved.

‘Find that balance’

In cases that cannot be dismissed easily, schools will take precautions to protect potential victims and resolve conflicts. They are directed to conduct safety evaluations for threats found to be serious and substantive, screening students for mental health services, creating a safety plan, and conducting law enforcement investigations for evidence of planning or preparation.

After all that, teams put the safety plan in place, document the student’s behavior and monitor whether their plans are working. Sometimes that involves arresting or transferring the student to a disciplinary alternative education program.

While Cypress-Fairbanks works to train enough staff to create such teams at each campus, Sims said the district already has created two mental-health intervention teams. At least one person on every campus is trained in suicide risk assessment.

The hope, she said, is to make sure every threat is handled on a case-by-case basis and to avoid creating a dragnet that siphons students into the criminal justice system.

“You want to take every concern seriously, but we’ve got to find that balance,” Sims said. “I really think the community wants an appropriate and appropriately measured response.”

Jordan and District Attorney Kim Ogg met with school officials during the summer to encourage similar responses. Jordan said data show their work has been effective — his office has charged only 19 juveniles with making threats or exhibiting firearms so far this school year. He said students now know they will be held accountable for making threats after many of their classmates were arrested the year before.

“Frankly, the easy thing to do is what we did last year — they said the words and it meets element of the crime” and students are charged, Jordan said. “But the easy thing is not always the smart thing to do.”