COLUMBUS, Ohio—The prosecutor calls it “bomb week,” his shorthand for eight school threats—many written in school bathrooms or on notes—over a few days in May that set off evacuations and investigations, parental panic, and the rumor mill of students linked by cellphones and social media in his Ohio county.
Track athletes missed an end-of-season competition, and some high schoolers started carrying their car keys with them instead of leaving them in lockers, just in case, Warren County prosecutor David Fornshell said. One mother complained that a girl who uses an insulin pump had taken it off for gym class and had to evacuate without it.
“Nobody who sends their kids to school should have to go through that kind of stress and that type of disruption,” Fornshell said.
Such violent or disruptive threats are increasing nationwide, according to police, school employees, security consultants and others, blamed sometimes on local students and sometimes on outsiders seeking to cause disruptions or a big emergency response.
State and local agencies don’t track the threats, meaning there’s no formal accounting of the collective costs. The disruptions typically aren’t long enough to merit makeup classes, but the learning time lost to evacuations and cancellations adds up, as do the hours police spend responding and investigating.
Less measurable but still significant are the ways threats can dent staff and students’ sense of security even when they’re false alarms, as they almost always are.
“Schools are in a really bad position,” said researcher Amy Klinger, of the nonprofit Educator’s School Safety Network. “People are going to be mad if you evacuate; people are going to be upset if you don’t evacuate.”
The number of school bomb threats the last academic year alone, based on media reports, was at least 1,267, roughly twice as many as in 2012-13, said Klinger, who also teaches educational administration at Ohio’s Ashland University.
Her group estimates there were about eight bomb threats per school day last year, and that doesn’t include other threats of violence and disruption. Massachusetts had the most in that tally at 135 bomb threats, followed by Ohio with 96.
