Author Spotlight
Connor Vogel
Junior Kingston Savich discreetly checked his phone in the middle of Algebra class. The top notification from SnapChat on the screen shocked him.
A threat that an East student had a gun in his backpack was circulated in group chats and on social media on Sept. 30.
One of his friends had sent a message to the 50-person JV football group chat about the threat. In a matter of minutes, the entire class was whispering about the rumors.
This was the second potential threat East had received that week, leaving Savich scared for his safety in school.
Since transferring to East two years ago, the idea of someone bringing a gun to school never even crossed his mind. Now, everytime he goes to school he thinks of the fastest escape route.
“[I learned] this was the second one, but I didn’t think there was gonna be any [threats] at all here,” Savich said. “If there was a third one, I might start wearing a parachute to school, in case I’m on the roof. I just gotta get out.”
The two incidents at East were a small number compared to the 16 threats seen across the district in a two-week period in the month of September.
Last year, only eight threats were investigated by the district, according to SMSD Police Chief Mark Schmidt.
These threats to the school district are part of a noticeable uptick across the U.S. in school shooting threats since the Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia on Sept. 4, creating fear in the classrooms and an increased focus on forming threat assessment plans for these situations.
Schmidt explains that these incidents typically start online with students reposting vague information involving a threat targeting “East,” sparking fear before the district police can confirm which East school is being referenced.
After investigating each of the threats this year, Student Resource Officers Tony Woollen and Jeremy Shull found that both were non-credible. However, those determinations often came after the rumors caused significant disruption to classes and encouraged dozens of kids to be pulled out of school for the day.
These hoax shooting threats disrupt schools, waste limited law enforcement resources and put first responders in unnecessary danger, according to the FBI.
Woollen wants students to feel comfortable telling the SROs and teachers when they see or hear about a potential threat so the school can take swift action and prevent any “ripples” from student’s online gossip.
“If someone hears something, they need to say something,” Woollen said. “We don’t want any barriers at all from people giving more information.”
Savich believes students have a difficult time knowing how to respond to these threats correctly when they don’t know what is actually going on with the investigation.
“I didn’t want to stress any more people out, but the people who already knew about it should have told teachers instead of sending it in group chats,” Savich said. “Sending it in group chats is going to become a game of telephone.”
The FBI’s started the campaign #thinkbeforeyoupost in response to an increase in school threats in 2018. The initiative reminds people that intentionally starting a false threat is still a felony and highlights the issues with circulating these threats on social media. The goal is to prevent these rumors from getting out of hand before they can be properly investigated.
Schools already handle thousands of shooting threats that don’t appear on social media or the news, according to the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Threat Assessment and Management.
This is because Kansas and many other states don’t have any required data tracking for school shooting threats, so there’s no way to know the impact this issue has on schools across the country.
“We take each [threat] seriously,” SMSD Chief Communications Officer David Smith said. “So you know, it doesn’t matter to us how many there are, we’re going to take every one seriously.”
This practice of quietly handling the threats is partially why many students weren’t even aware of a previous threat made on Aug. 24 until Principal Jason Peres sent out an email to parents and guardians — only after an investigation confirmed the threat was noncredible.
“Social media can spread misinformation just as easily as it can spread real information,” Peres said. “I don’t think our school, our community or kids often know the difference between what’s real and what’s not real when it’s posted on social media.”
But, not sharing information until after the investigation can undermine students’ trust in the school when they’re unaware of potential threats to their safety, according to senior Lilly Greenstein.
“I feel like if they did tell us [about a threat], it could create a sense of panic,” Greenstein said. “But it also creates a sense of trust, because the school would be transparent about telling students what’s going on.”
With no specific policy in place from the Kansas Department of Education, schools and the district are on their own to develop a plan of action to deal with these threats, according to Smith.
“What we have are ‘practices,’ some of which I can talk about and some of which probably would not be appropriate to talk about,” Smith said. “Just because how we assess threats is information that would be valuable to somebody who wanted to create chaos or something more than that.”
The district has a crisis plan designated for fires, tornadoes and code red drills, but there’s no specific procedure for how schools should handle shooting threats.
“Each [threat] will look slightly different depending on what it is,” Smith said. “There’s not a playbook that exists because each situation is different. What [schools] do is everything you need to in order to make sure you understand what has happened and why, and that there is no threat [not investigated].”
According to Education week, 85% of schools have a designated team to handle threat assessment.
At East, meetings are held every Monday with Peres, associate principals and SROs to review the school’s crisis plan and how they plan to handle potential threats like an active shooter or a rumor online.
“Just last week, we had just talked about [shooting threats],” Woollen said. “So we knew exactly, as a team, what we’re going to do. Everybody knew their roles. Everybody knows their responsibilities.”
Greenstein agrees that while schools all handle threats differently, the district should be sharing necessary information when they become aware of a threat with the students in order to prevent mass panic based on unfounded information they hear in class. This is why many students are called out of class.
“I don’t think there is a safest option in cases like this,” Greenstein said. “I know some people went home just because they were so scared. But, I only stayed because of the fact that if I left, I would be marked absent.”
Advancements in technology have helped schools develop new security measures, like cameras and automatic locks on doors, to protect students in class from a potential crisis, according to Chief Schmidt.
Working primarily with local police and the FBI’s Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit to track down online threats, most of the district’s investigations are successfully completed within a day.
In order to ensure the SMSD threat assessment practices remain effective, SROs pursue training not required by the district at seminars held by organizations like the Secret Service and FBI on how to handle different security issues.
Students may be afraid to go to school after hearing about shooting threats, but the SROs hope that students can trust them to keep schools safe.
“SROs came into the light in 1996 because of school shootings, and I think the basic job has always stayed the same,” Schmidt said. “The number one goal is to make sure every student, every teacher, every administrator and every police officer goes home every day.”
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