Tiktok threats upend schools and students

We sent our daughters to school Friday.

Before they left — Caroline, 8, for another third-grade Friday, and Julia, 4, for pre-kindergarten — the girls took advantage of the clear, mild morning and played school in our backyard. Sitting at a picnic table, Caroline instructed her sister on the alphabet.

Julia can already spell her name. “J-U-L-I-A,” she chimed cheerily. I took some comfort in that as I took a deep a breath and put Caroline on the bus a few minutes later. My wife, nine months pregnant with our third child and due to deliver on Monday, told me she took a similar deep breath when she dropped off Julia.

Sending Caroline and Julia to school should be a normal, everyday decision. On Friday, it was a decision that required some small amount of bravery.

Our school district — like thousands of others across the New York suburbs and the nation — sent a message Thursday warning parents of threats of school violence that had been made across social media platforms like Tiktok. Our high school had already been closed Tuesday following a specific threat of violence. A few towns over from our home in northern Westchester County, the schools in Newtown, Connecticut were also closed Tuesday for the ninth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre.

“All districts in the Westchester County have been made aware of a new trend on Tiktok that threatens violence at schools nationwide tomorrow, Friday, December 17,” wrote Joel Adelberg, superintendent of the Bedford Central School District, in a Thursday communication to parents.

For exhausted parents across the country — who shouldered the rigors of remote learning in the pandemic’s early months, who debated the necessities of vaccines and mask-wearing and who are now facing rising COVID-19 transmission rates in our schools — the threats of violence, real or otherwise, marked a new low in morale.

On Thursday evening and Friday morning, text chains across my network chimed with inquiries and concerns — “Are you sending your kids?” and “I don’t know if I can.”

After Caroline and Julia set off on their days, I jumped in my car and surveyed the security presence at our elementary school and at our middle and high schools. Police cruisers were parked at each, on the ready.

‘I did linger a moment longer’

It’s not that parents in my generation — who remember Columbine, lived through 9/11 and have now weathered two years of pandemic — are nervous. It’s that our nerves are raw.

Amanda Smith, a parent in Newtown and a native of Michigan, which is still reeling from the massacre at Oxford High School, told me she was exasperated by the threats, even as she’s come to expect them.

“I find it astonishing that my children live in a time where the threat of school shootings not only still exists, but has been enhanced to the point that school shootings are just the status quo,” Smith said.

‘Keep you safe and love you’

That stress is being felt by students, too.

Tharaha Thavakumar, a schoolbased therapist based in East Rochester, New York, said she was working to help students cope with that stress on Friday.

“We’re already in a rough year with mental health after the return from remote learning, and now we add all these societal threats,” Thavakumar said, explaining that she had separate conversations with both her children, one 5 and the other 14, about the threats on Tiktok.

For exhausted parents across the country, the threats of violence, real or otherwise, marked a new low in morale.

The work to come

We haven’t spoken to Caroline and Julia about the threats that have followed the horrendous attack at Oxford. They don’t remember Newtown, Columbine or Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. They don’t yet operate their lives on smartphones bearing the Tiktok and Instagram apps.

Soon, though, they’ll have to learn. There are hard conversations to come.

In the meantime — even as we bring another young life into the world this holiday season — our family will try to rest up.

Parenting will take every ounce of strength we can muster.

Ed Forbes is a senior editor for the USA TODAY Network’s Atlantic Group, overseeing opinion for news organizations in New York,new Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Email: eforbes@gannett.com Twitter: @edforbes