Students in several states were arrested. Administrators increased security protocols. A school district a few dozen miles from superintendent Michael Bennett’s campus in Greenville, N.Y., near Albany, cancelled classes and afterschool activities and shuttered buildings after it received threatening phone messages. These events are not rare. Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that advocates for gun violence prevention, recorded 139 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in the U.S. in 2024. Far from these shootings, schools feel the ripple effects. Assessing the credibility of threats, especially viral ones that spread online, has become an increasingly common and challenging part of the daily lives of school superintendents and principals, USA Today reports. It’s a distraction from the main reason students and teachers are at school in the first place, Bennett said. “It’s tough to learn when you’re worried about the threats,” he said. “And it’s tough to teach.”
A week after the shooting in Georgia, another superintendent, Aaron Spence, was juggling a crisis – a deluge of threats directed at the schools he oversees in suburban Virginia. Law enforcement officials had spent days “tirelessly” running down leads, tracing their origins and speaking to witnesses. Though none of the potential dangers were ultimately deemed credible, Spence knew parents at Loudoun County Public Schools needed two things: First, they had to hear directly from the superintendent. In an email to families, he acknowledged the “senseless violence” happening at other schools. They also had to know that any threat, even those made by children and meant as jokes, would be taken seriously and investigated. Crisis management is a part of the job description of superintendents. Apart from the copycat threats that inundated Spence's district this month, the issue of opioid use has also loomed over his tenure. A year ago, nearly a dozen students at one of his schools suffered overdoses over several weeks. The district's delay in notifying parents about the cases prompted criticism from the state’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, who issued an executive order directing Virginia schools to notify parents of a school-connected overdose within 24 hours.
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