Schools are being bombarded with hoax shooting threats - and the semester has just begun

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Louise Thomas

Editor

With a new academic year underway, schools across the U.S. are facing twin threats: the very real prospect of gun violence, as evidenced by the recent tragedy in Georgia, and a rising wave of hoax threats.

In the wake of the Apalachee High shooting, FBI Houston officials said they had gotten more hoax school threats in the following three weeks than in the previous three years. A Missouri hotline has already gotten 301 potential school threats, nearing the total of the entire previous academic year. One Florida sheriff said 54 threats came through a state tip line on a single night this semester.

Lodi, California, has experienced threats both real and imagined since, to frightening results. On September 16, Lodi police arrested a 15-year in connection to threats against an unnamed local school, part of a wave of similar arrests around the Central Valley.

Two days later, an alarm tripped at Lodi High School, sending the campus into a full lockdown, prompting community members to panic. Lodi worried disaster had finally struck them too.

As police raced to campus, false rumors quickly spread on social media and between residents that one or maybe multiple suspects were on the scene and arrests had been made.

Parents flocked outside the school gates, seeking to recover their children, whose text messages from inside the school reportedly reached the community ahead of official school communications.

The whole thing, according to Lodi superintendent Neil Young, was a false alarm. A substitute secretary accidentally triggered the alarm system, and in the process, triggered the community’s anxiety over a school shooting.

“Because of recent events, recent tragedies, there is a fear amongst parents and community members,” Young told The Independent.

As the crisis unfolded, Young said he was in constant communication with school officials and police, making sure “accuracy is the key ingredient” in each piece of information the district communicated.

People on social media, however, raced ahead of the facts.

He added: “In the world of social media and instant notifications, that spread so quickly, even though I was in constant communication with the chief of police, with the Lodi Police Department, and not one of those messages was true, it still added to the fears that people had.”

Add onto that a student population inundated with news of school shootings, and Covid lockdowns that disrupted social development for many young people, and it’s a recipe for students who are both hyper-aware of shootings and struggling to adequately process “nonstop information” online, Young said.

While false claims of a shooting have never been easier to make online, law enforcement must act as if each threat is credible until proven otherwise.

Moreover, police departments are under extra scrutiny given high-profile failures like the disastrously slow response to the Uvalde school shooting, where numerous police officers waited over an hour to directly engage an active shooter barricaded in a classroom with children. Two responding officers were ultimately criminally charged over their response.

Most school shooters offer some kind of advanced warning or signal of their plans, and no one wants to ignore a genuine threat, according to Mo Canady, a former Alabama police officer and current executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, an organization which trains school police officers.

“When we get that kind of report, that’s going to generate a law enforcement response until we know that [the threat] is not in fact true,” he told The Independent. “Here’s the thing: we have to respond to something as if it is real. If we don’t, it will be.”

Even the fake calls have serious costs for local police departments, and some officers are fed up.

Volusia County, Florida, Sheriff Mike Chitwood has started using name and shame tactics for hoax callers, filming “perp walk” videos and releasing the names and identities of teens who call in false threats, including an 11-year-old boy.

“For you parents out there, today’s hoax cost around $21,000,” Chitwood said last month after one such threat came in. “We’re coming after you, and... we’re going to start publishing [your child’s] face and doing perp walks with him when we take him into custody.”

Canady said there have always been unfounded threats to schools, but he’s witnessed an evolution in their nature over the past two years.

In a slightly earlier iteration, mystery individuals would bombard school systems, cities or whole states with threatening calls. Some hoaxers have used internet-based dialing systems that are both low-cost and hard to trace to their original callers.

One California teen was even accused of being a prolific “swatter-for-hire,” charging $75 to call in threats to schools and other institutions, in an effort to prompt highly armed police SWAT teams to show up.

More recently, Canady said, students themselves seem to be calling in the fake threats, or inadvertently reposting social media claims of imminent threats. In 2021, following the Oxford High shooting in Michigan, a purported ‘National Shoot Up Your School Day Challenge’ allegedly spread on TikTok, causing alarm nationwide.

Few could point to its origin or any credible threats, and no shootings took place on the December day of the alleged challenge.

Sarah Burd-Sharps, senior director of research at the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, said the interplay between actual shootings, media coverage, student awareness of shootings and community vigilance can create a “vicious cycle” of repeated threats.

“There is an increase in school threats after high-profile shootings,” she said. “Why? One big reasons is because the public becomes hyper-vigilant after a shooting and tends to report threats and suspicions at higher rates.”

According to Everytown’s research, campus shooting incidents surged more than 30 percent in the previous school year, heightening community and media attention even further.

Experts say that solutions have to go beyond simply punishing students for making false claims, though making a false threat or reporting a false crime is itself illegal.

Children make violent threats for a range of reasons—from undergoing mental trauma to seeking attention to making foolish jokes that get out of hand—but it’s important to remember they are still children, according to F. Chris Curran, associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, who has studied school shootings.

“While it’s easy to vilify these individuals, it’s important to remember they are kids, and the vast majority of threats are not credible,” he told The Independent via email. “While we want to teach our young people that making such threats is not acceptable, we also have to be careful about the negative impact on criminalizing and responding too harshly to children and youth’s behavior.”

“Arresting and pursuing a criminal justice response is likely to make things worse for that child in the long term,” he added.

Young, the Lodi superintendent, said it’s important for children to have trusted adults they can turn to at home and on campus, and mental and behavioral health resources they can turn to in times of crisis.

“We need to know our children,” he said. “That happens through relationships. We also need to understand that avenues need to exist for students who are struggling so they don’t have to struggle in silence.”

Republican officials often call for increased policing and security at schools as a top solution. During a September rally in Phoenix, Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance called school shootings a “fact of life” that underscored the need to provide additional security at schools, a strategy often referred to “school hardening.”

As The Independent has reported, research suggests school resource officers alone make a negligible impact on the severity of school shootings.

Canady, a policing expert, said security technology, door locks and well-equipped school police officers who know their students are all great steps, but they’re just one part of the solution, a mix that also requires a trusting school environment, mental health resources and districts thinking intentionally about school security and student behavior.

“It’s a holistic process,” he said. “It has many parts to it.”

The recent shooting at a Georgia high school underscores how difficult it is to stop school shootings, even with warning signs.

Alleged gunman Colt Gray was investigated in 2023 for making threats on social media to carry out a school shooting, which he denied.

Just over a year later, he has been charged with carrying out Apalachee shooting, using an assault rifle his father bought him for Christmas and killing four inside his chool.

Gray’s mother claimed she called the school the day of the shooting to warn them of the “extreme emergency” that could be heading their way, but confusion over a student with a similar name reportedly hampered the school’s efforts to check up on the teen until it was too late.

Despite these difficulties, Everytown’s Burd-Sharps said we can’t lose site of what’s behind all school shooting threats that turn into real-world violence - access to guns.

The vast majority of school shootings, she said, are carried out with weapons obtained from the home of a parent or close relative, like the one in Georgia that’s prompted so many copycat threats.

“All the locks and the bulletproof glass in the world cannot change that trajectory of a young kid who’s in crisis and has easy access to a gun their home,” she said.