The tough decisions parents are making as never-ending threats to schools become the norm

Atlanta (CNN) — A week after a 14-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle killed two fellow students and two teachers at a high school in Winder, Georgia, cell phones started buzzing about 50 miles away.

An automated call, then a text from Atlanta Public Schools pinged on the evening of Wednesday, September 11, in the pockets and purses of parents and guardians of the district’s 50,000 students. (Not seeing image? Tap here.)

Soon, text chains among the region’s parents began lighting up, too.

But instead of coordinating youth football practice carpools or sharing gripes over the latest math strategies, the threads were alive for the next 24 or so hours with the frantic risk-reward calculus so well known to American parents in the modern age of campus shootings:

Is it safe to send my kids to school tomorrow?

The mass attack at Winder’s Apalachee High School was at least the year’s 45th school shooting in America. And in the two days that followed, Georgia charged two dozen youths with making threats to schools and put them in youth detention centers, authorities told CNN.

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. It typically gets 500 in a year, according to an academic study that claims it’s one of the first to quantify more than 1,000 threats of school violence over four academic years.

No agency or group tracks all threats of US school violence, from possible gun attacks to bombings to any other conceivable danger.

“Schools likely quietly handle thousands of threats of shootings that do not make the news,” the study’s authors wrote this year in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Threat Assessment and Management.

It means on any given day, American parents could find themselves jolted into weighing seminal priorities like academics, athletics and social bonding at school against the veracity of a threat of violence on campus, the corollary atmosphere of more armed police in school hallways and whether keeping children home the next day might mean sacrificing work hours critical to keeping a family afloat.

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.

Atlanta Public Schools hadn’t warned caregivers so broadly of possible danger like this in at least a year, he said. And in the minutes after the alert went out, lots of parents didn’t know what to think.

“It just becomes this multifaceted horror … There’s just no right answer,” said one mother who acknowledged her “family can absorb that financial hit in a way that other kids’ families can’t” to keep a child out of school because of a threat.

Deciding what to do also means having to “tiptoe around each other,” she continued, “because it’s like: I don’t want you to feel like I’m judging you if you send your kids to school; I don’t want you to feel judged if you keep your kid home.

“Because, like, this is an impossible situation.”

‘Sending them to a war of their own’

Of course, the era of US school shootings and a lack of meaningful legislation to curb gun violence also has ushered in unprecedented fortifications at schools, from panic buttons to easy-to-exit emergency windows and metal detectors to routine student lockdown drills and bulletproof backpacks.

“It’s just more police, more surveillance, armed officers. And that to me is very scary,” observed another Atlanta-area mom who said her daughter asked her recently about the defensive strength of windows in a security vestibule into her school.

“She’s like, ‘Are those bulletproof?’ … “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. I don’t actually know.’ And it turns out they are bullet-resistant,” the mother told CNN.

“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.

The lesson came down to this: “The school, it works really, really hard to practice with you certain procedures … to keep the area safe. And so I feel like you’re perfectly safe,” he recalled telling his daughter. “But this did happen at this school, and some people did die as a result … I’m just trying to make her feel as safe as possible, but also I don’t want her to be naive.”

The next morning, September 12 – with the threat alert still in place – parents across the Atlanta area awoke to the ultimate game-time decision:

Send them to school or keep them home?

After arrival bells rang across the region, another pair of parents compared their decisions:

Fear ‘rescheduled’ to a lower-profile day

Classes rolled on that Thursday across the Atlanta area.

School district police officers “were reassigned to spend more time on all elementary campuses” and other local law enforcement was asked “to provide directed patrol at all APS campuses,” district spokesperson Coleman said weeks later. The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office sent 11 motor and K-9 units to help that day, it later told CNN; the Atlanta Police Department deferred CNN’s questions to Atlanta Public Schools.

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 (6) 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.

Just two weeks later, as school violence threats continued to flare from coast to coast, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released the Anonymized Threat Response Guidance: A Toolkit for K-12 Schools “to help … schools and their law enforcement and community partners create tailored approaches to addressing anonymous threats of violence.”

“K-12 schools across the country are experiencing a scourge of anonymous threats of violence. School leaders need scalable solutions to navigate these ever-evolving and burdensome threats,” the agency’s director said in a news release.

“Families, students and educators should not have to question whether they’re safe when they walk into a classroom,” an FBI official added.

Meanwhile, though, so many parents across the nation already understand deeply what the school threat study’s authors put succinctly in their conclusion: “Threats of violence can have serious consequences for the safety and well-being of students, teachers and other school staff. They can have a significant impact on the overall learning environment, as well as on the physical and mental health of a community.”

Earlier on September 12, the same Atlanta-area mom who said she’d been “furious and crying constantly” also shared with another mom the lingering fear harbored by her child, even as he opted to head to class that day:

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