When is a school threat real?

By Dan Wascoe

Star Tribune

      In New Prague last weekend, officials checked into rumors of student threats and deemed them unfounded but closed two schools Monday as a precaution.

      In Lake Elmo, two teenage boys were arrested Monday for allegedly making off-campus threats online against specific middle-school students, but officials decided to keep schools open.

      On Wednesday a scrawled general threat on a restroom wall at the 2,900-student Blaine High School resulted in a lockdown and staged closing of the school. No one is in custody, but classes resumed Thursday with extra police protection. Meanwhile, a bomb threat Thursday at a sister school, Champlin Park High, prompted an hour's evacuation before classes resumed.

      In this anxious Minnesota spring, following school shootings in Red Lake, officials say the range of responses to student threats reflects a key question: What might be a serious hazard and what might be a thoughtless prank? They say they are continuing to learn which responses are most appropriate in particular circumstances.

      "If you close the schools for every threat, you'd have half the schools closed all the time," said Charlie Kyte, a former teacher, principal and superintendent who is executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators.

      He said other episodes have gone unreported this spring, including one in which a threat against a school was traced to a boy disgruntled over another boy's attention to a girl.

      "There's an awful lot of principals probably eating Tums," as they try to sort out which threats to take seriously, Kyte said. He said superintendents and other officials are "talking back and forth" about how to respond.

      He added that the flurry of recent episodes may recur every year near the anniversaries of shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., and at Red Lake in Minnesota and the remembrance of Adolf Hitler's birthday.

      Maple Grove High School was evacuated briefly last month because of a bomb threat, and parent Steven Levin said he prefers that officials err on the side of safety. Levin, whose son is a junior at Maple Grove, said that administrators of larger schools may have less confidence than those in smaller schools that they know every student and the seriousness of their threats.

      "How many times does the story [of a school tragedy] read, 'We had no clue'?" he said. "The clues are all there in hindsight. It's foresight that's not 20/20. ... I really don't envy their positions in having to make those decisions."

      Scott Croonquist, executive director of the Association of Metropolitan School Districts, said the issues of how to respond to threats and how school districts and police should interact "will be a hot topic for workshops."

A recent experience

      One superintendent on the front lines this week was Frankie Poplau of New Prague. She said the decision to close the district's high school and middle school Monday was "not so much because of the level of threat but because of the level of fear" among parents and students.

      It would not have been useful to open the schools and "bring hysteria in" or risk very low attendance. Allowing a one-day buffer to let things settle "did really, really work," she said, adding that attendance was 94 percent on Tuesday.

      She also said that Tuesday was a teachable moment in New Prague classrooms.

      "Kids have always talked big, talked smart, talked tough," she said. "But today you don't get to play with violent talk or words or writing."

      Mary Olson, spokeswoman for the Anoka-Hennepin district, said Wednesday morning, before the district's Blaine High School was locked down and closed, that several previous episodes in the district did not result in closings. Offending students have been suspended, and letters have been written to parents.

      "In general, we consider each case individually," she said. "We had not had a situation where we felt the school was going to be attacked."

      At Champlin Park Thursday, where students were let back in, parent Nancy Freeman said she had confidence in that decision because she trusts and respects Principal David Brom and his staff.

      A complication for school officials is how newspapers, radio and TV stations cover school threats. Olson said that some principals' biggest fear in cases of threats is "a call from a reporter."

      Kyte said, "I know it's illogical if you say the media should not report any of this stuff" to prevent copycat threats. But he said that "when you get the 20th school [closing], it sort of becomes old news."

      Poplau said news coverage must be expected because "we are public entities. How the media present [an issue] always has an impact," but she said that it's "a leap" to link news coverage of school threats to copycat threats.

      Star Tribune Editor Anders Gyllenhaal said, "Part of the paper's role is to check out all these cases around the state and make thoughtful decisions about how important and newsworthy they are based on what we find. I don't think careful reporting and measured play causes more of these cases."

      He added that decisions to publish stories about threats often hinge on whether authorities close a school, make arrests or take other action. "In other cases, the reports may be nothing more than rumors that don't warrant coverage," he said.

      Poplau predicted that with experience, school leaders will learn to standardize their responses to threats. For example, if a superintendent believes a threat might reflect a student's effort to get out of school, one response might be to move students to a different school.

      Kyte said he remembers a fourth-grader in Northfield who brought "a big honking knife to school" for show and tell because it was a prized possession in the student family's culture. Instead of calling police, Kyte said, he found an interpreter to explain why knives in schools were not a good idea.

      Croonquist and Poplau said such an incident probably would not be handled that way today. An administrator "would go straight by the book" and contact police, Croonquist said.

      Poplau said that in New Prague last weekend, some fearful parents were asking "why aren't [school] windows blacked out and why aren't there police at the doors?"

      In a time when "we are all living with fear," she said, safety is important. But "we have to learn what needs to be feared."