With School Bomb Threat Hoaxes, A Long Tale of Frustration and Trauma

Massachusetts mother Allison Pelton gets up with her son every morning, prepares his lunch and a snack for the day, and drives him to school, hoping he will learn and make friends. While at school, he plays sports in an intramural program for a half hour before the bell rings and the school day begins.

But when a bomb threat was made against his school last month, what began as a routine day became one of stress and frenzy involving police, difficult decisions, panicked parents and anxious students.

The day the school received the threat, students were shuffled into the gym while the principal contacted law enforcement, who conducted a sweep of the school. The principal sent an automated mass message to parents, who could either leave their jobs or homes to pick up their kids, or students would stay at the school until normal time.

Pelton, who works from home, was on a business call when the automated message from the principal was sent to parents. She would have to go to the school to pick up her son.

“It’s very unsettling to not feel like you can take your child to school and that they will be safe,” said Pelton. “The fact that he, at 11 years old, has to worry about going to school and not knowing it’s safe makes me angry and makes me realize there’s a fine balance between teaching your children to be courageous and be safe.”

Several schools across Massachusetts received threats Monday. Last month, seven schools in 15 other communities received bomb threats in Massachusetts, nine communities received threats in New Jersey, and threats were also made in Delaware, Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona and Florida.

National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based school security firm, conducted a survey and reviewed 812 school threats across the country from Aug. 1 to Dec. 31, 2014, finding that threats were up 158 percent from 2013, when a similar survey was conducted.

The survey found that threats were made across schools in 46 states, and that the most common type of threat was a bomb threat, with 44 percent.

Tom Scott, executive director of Massachusetts State Superintendent of Schools, described the frequency of these threats as unprecedented in 45 years of working in education.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of disruption with what’s going on with these kinds of bomb scares,” he said. “The amount of time educators are going to have to spend today managing and having to think about, and planning for all the issues related to public safety is extraordinary.”

“Unfortunately, one of the fallouts from these things is how much damage this does that people don’t think about, the impact it has on kids, adults, communities. It’s a serious problem,” Scott said.

Threats lead to lockdowns, evacuations, and involvement from police and fire departments. They instill fear and anxiety in students, parents and teachers, who have been taken on an emotional roller coaster for what commonly turns out to be a waste of resources and tax dollars.

The increasing number of threats are part of a troubling trend in the past few years, according to school officials, state and local police and fire departments.

When Threats Are Received

The process of a response to a bomb threat involves school officials reaching out to police and fire departments, which assess the type of threat and decide its legitimacy based on its nature, the delivery method, the similarity to other threats made and the frequency. A search of the school is conducted, sometimes entry into the school is limited and monitored, and the principal or superintendent ultimately makes a judgement call on whether to put the school under lockdown or evacuate, said Winchester Police Department Lt. Peter MacDonnell.

It is this decision that has been a divisive issue among schools across the United States. Differing responses were never as clear as on Dec. 15, when a threat to New York City schools went virtually ignored but an identical threat on the West Coast led to the closure of all schools in Los Angeles, Patch previously reported.

The decision to evacuate or not weighs heavily on the administrators who must make the decision, Scott said.

“There’s no question, every time something like this occurs, there’s a certain anxiety, a certain fear that pops up. That’s one of the hard things to manage here,” Scott said. “You have schools where it’s announced kids are going to be informed of a bomb threat. Most kids have cell phones. Now you have social media lighting up, parents getting these messages, not knowing the details. They panic.”

The tools that allow for speedy communication to inform others of the threats that are made are the same tools commonly used to make these threats, according to the school security council survey. The survey revealed that electronic devices and social media apps were the predominantly used method of threat communication, with 37 percent of threats sent using social media, email, text messaging and other online resources. Social media alone accounted for 28 percent, most commonly Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

This shift in technology both contributes to the frequency of threats and requires additional training and changes in the course of investigations, said MacDonnell.

“When I was growing up, someone would pull the fire alarm or make a phone call via a landline and people didn’t take it as seriously and didn’t necessarily close a school,” he said. “I think the number of active shooting incidents has affected the way the police do investigations, and they’re so publicized. I think people are naturally on their guard.”

The Impact Outside Of School

Maya Antar is a single mother in Billerica whose child’s school has received multiple threats in the past month. She has not been able to focus on her work as a dental supplies saleswoman because of the threats. She constantly checks her email and text messages to make sure another message from her son’s school has not been sent about a threat.

“I’m nervous every single day,” Antar said. “I’m constantly keeping my phone charged because I’m so scared that I’m going to get a phone call. Every time an email comes in, every time my phone vibrates, I’m always checking in. I’m just too nervous.”

When her son’s school received a threat last month, she had to make the stressful drive to pick up her son from school and lost “a lot of money,” she said, as her pay is directly tied to the number of sales she makes every day.

Though she said she is grateful for what she has, she has found the threats “heartbreaking,” she said, and described how she tries to calm her son’s fears.

“I have to be the big person. He heard someone say something about a bomb threat and he panicked, saying, ‘Mom, what’s going on?’ I had to hold him and cuddle with him for a little bit and make him forget about it. I had to tell him it’s going to be OK and tell him nothing is going to happen … but I don’t even know.”

The Cost

Schools also lose big financially as a result of threats since they have to pay for transportation costs to move students to other sites during an evacuation, which can be “significant,” said Scott.

“Certainly one of the major costs is what happens to transportation,” Scott said. “In many cases, when a school decides to evacuate, they have to evacuate to another location and get buses to go out of their normal routine to pick up kids and bring them to another school. Sometimes you’ll have additional costs in terms of accommodation for the kids in that setting.”

What you cannot put a price tag on, though, is the time and educational opportunity wasted, Scott said.

“Those teachers now are not teaching, not educating, and instead providing safety and management of a student population,” Scott said. “It’s a waste having to deal with the disruption.”

The students also bear the emotional burden, Scott said.

“Kids who have high levels of anxiety are going to be more anxious,” he said. “A lot of conversation needs to be going on, talking about why are these happening and what’s going on out there that causes people to do this.”

Threats also create a waste of time, effort and resources for police and taxpayers who fund police departments, MacDonnell said, in addition to being, on a personal level, annoying and frustrating.

“There are times when a tremendous amount of hours go into an investigation like these because you’re doing a lot of work via the computer, and you’re tracing IP addresses or a phone location ... or you’re writing search warrants and doing subpoenas,” MacDonnell said. “That takes investigators sitting down, writing affidavits. That takes time and money. If it’s a hoax, it takes valuable police time, where we could be using it elsewhere.”

“It can be annoying, and it’s not unusual at all to find the person who makes these threats, they’re not even in this state,” MacDonnell said. “Quite often you’re tracing an IP address back to a spoof address and have to take it to the next step.

“Tracking through the Internet is more time consuming and difficult than tracking through the woods.”

The Threats

The types of threats can vary from a scribble on a wall to a note, a phone call or an email, and in each case, a preliminary investigation is undertaken in which the evidence, depending on the type, is recorded and photographed.

Details such as the date and time are documented, MacDonnell said, adding, “You want to get as much info you can about the who, what, when, where and how.”

The location of a phone threat and the IP address of an email threat are investigated and, depending on the apparent legitimacy, if it shares similarity or a pattern with other threats, the federal authorities are sometimes involved.

When the maker of a threat is found, the consequences can be irrevocable and disastrous.

In September 2015, a Coopersville, Mich. student received a $10,000 fine and a felony conviction after he reportedly gave personal details to an online chat room member named Ransom, who called the student’s school while he listened on the phone and made a “SWAT” — a prank 911 call that results in dispatch of an emergency response team for a critical incident, like a school threat, reported WZZM13.

The student’s mother reported her son did not know what was happening but because he sat on the phone and listened while the SWAT was made, he was considered an accomplice by the court, which led to his conviction and “ruined our life,” she reported to WZZM13.

Nineteen-year-old Oklahoma resident Shawn Farley was sentenced to 20 years in prison in October 2015 for a photo he posted in December 2014 in which he was holding a gun and threatening to go to a particular school and “shoot it up,” reported KFOR. The court ordered Farley to go to boot camp and told him if he didn’t complete the program, he would end up back in court. After he failed to make it through the camp, the judge sentenced him to 20 years, KFOR reported.

The FBI is investigating the slew of threats against schools across the country, but until a culprit is uncovered, parents like Pelton continue to send their children off into the unknown.

“It makes me nervous, and it makes me sad that schools have to go through this and children have to learn about the evils of the world at an early stage,” Pelton said. “It’s frightening. It’s very frightening.”

Pelton said her son was nervous to go back to school the day after the threats, asking questions about terrorism and ISIS, which he learned about in school, she said, and wondering if it would be safe to go back.

He returned to school and seems to have moved on from last month’s scare, but Pelton’s uncertainty, and the uncertainty of countless other parents, students, teachers and officials, remains. Pelton can only try to reassure her child the best she can.

“As a parent, I would do anything I can,” Pelton said, “to make sure he’s safe and doesn’t live his life in fear.”

Photos courtesy of Massachusetts State Police