When threats of violence at school flare up, parents in America face ‘an impossible situation’

Editor’s Note: CNN granted anonymity to sources in this story at their request to protect them, their families and their children’s schools from further threats. Similarly, in the first three weeks of this academic year, 282 bogus written threats to kill or shoot up a school were recorded in Florida’s Volusia County, said its sheriff, who issued a warning to students, parents and anyone else thinking about making a threat: Legit or not, “it’s going to get your ass sent to jail.” And even those tallies are dwarfed by this: The district home of Oxford High School in Michigan – where a teenager in 2021 killed four students and wounded six others and a teacher – got 35,000 threats in a month after the massacre. Another group of parents interpreted last month’s Atlanta Public Schools messages differently – but still weren’t sure what to do: “An uptick in … social media threats” following the Apalachee massacre and related to “multiple schools” had prompted the September 11 districtwide alert, Atlanta Public Schools spokesperson Seth Coleman would tell CNN weeks later; the city’s police department and the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office deferred questions to the district. “But, like, these are the conversations: She’s in fourth grade, you know, 9 years old.” Also on the evening of September 11, the parent who’d texted she wasn’t “super worried” at first about the coming day’s threat alert in Atlanta raised this idea in the group text about their elementary school: A dad who got that Atlanta Public Schools threat alert talked with his child about what happened in Winder and about lockdown drills held at her school “in case there was someone who was either bad – bad people – but also people who are just sick and in some cases … can do bad things,” he told CNN. School district police investigated about 20 threats related to the September 12 alert – 11 via its SaySomething.net reporting system, Coleman said, noting: “Multiple threats/tips concentrated at six specific school sites received and responded to on 9/12/2024.” In the end, three juveniles were referred to law enforcement, Coleman said, concluding of the districts’ schools that day: “No acts of violence.” As the sun began to set, yet another Atlanta-area mom checked in with a dad in her parent peer group: Still, as so many American parents know, this would not be the last such threat of school violence or the last campus security alert or the last day they’d have to make a potentially existential decision about whether to send their kids to class.