CLEVELAND – The preferred methods for sending violent school threats, such as bomb threats, used to be messages scrawled on school bathroom walls, notes clandestinely passed around classrooms, or anonymous calls from a pay phone.

But that’s drastically changing.

A new study released by the National School Safety and Security Services (NSSSS) shows perpetrators of violent threats toward schools still use those same methods. But many are quickly turning to Facebook, email, text messaging, and other forms of social media. The data shows more than one-third of the violent threats to schools since the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year were delivered that way.

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That means the threats travel faster and community panic spreads quicker.

Now experts want schools to fight back with the same weapons. They say more schools need to publish emergency management plans on websites, Facebook pages and other forms of modern media, so a system is in place, and familiar to key community members, when threats arise.

They also say more schools should utilize social media when a threat has been received, to communicate quickly, counter misinformation and avoid general panic.

“We need to make sure the schools are using social media proactively to talk about safety well ahead of a crisis,” says Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. “If parents, students and educators are hearing from their school leaders when there’s not a crisis and they know these different channels of communication are available and being used, then they’re going to turn to those channels for accurate information when there is a crisis.”

Panic spreads in seconds or minutes

Trump says the study involved 315 documented school bomb and shooting threats, hoaxes and acts of violence in 43 states from August 2013 through January 2014.

The breakdown of the methods used to deliver the threats is as follows:

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Electronic, including social media, email, text message 109 (35%)
Bathroom graffiti 48 (15%)
Notes found in school 27 (9%)
Phone threats 36 (11%)
Verbal threats 31 (10%)
Police refused to say how threat delivered 56 (18%)

Trump, who has worked as a safety and security consultant with schools nationwide for 30 years, says there is no national database for tracking the number of violent school threats taking place from year to year. But anecdotally there seems to be more this school year than the year before.

He says that’s normal following a high-profile incident, in this case the Newtown, Connecticut shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012. He says the current wave of threats seem to last longer and are more prevalent than in years past.

He says the use of social media actually aggravates these incidents. Threats that once took hours or even days to spread now take just seconds or minutes. Threats on cell phones or the Internet can be seen by hundreds or even thousands of people locally, nationally, and even internationally, sparking anxiety and fear among students, school administrators, teachers, and parents.

Therefore, he says, the situation now is much more complex for school officials and first responders. Threats are no longer situations where authorities have the time to investigate, manage the scene and then report out to the media.

“School administrators and first responders have to manage not only the threat, the incident, the potential cause of harm, but they have to also manage the communications, the misinformation and the rumors at the same time,” Trump says.

Kneejerk reactions

Because of the pressure, he says too often school administrators make the kneejerk reaction of prematurely evacuating or closing their schools. By doing so, that puts students outside the building, out in the streets, which is a less safe environment.

Trump says every threat has to be taken seriously and investigated. But school officials need to work with law enforcement to first determine the credibility of the threat before taking the drastic, costly action of closing the school.

He says leaders need to determine how the threat was made, the credibility of the threat, if there is evidence of any planning and preparation, and examine the specificity of the threat. The first reaction should not always be evacuating or shutting down the school.

“You don’t have to have paralysis by analysis, a committee, and a three-hour meeting to do it,” Trump says. “The general rule of thumb is the greater the detail and specificity of the threat, the greater the credibility that’s given to that potential threat and the greater security measures and response accordingly.”

School officials need to discuss what their response will be far ahead of any incident that occurs, according to Trump. He says they must have threat assessment protocols and crisis communication plans ready to go alongside their traditional emergency response plans “so school leaders are ready to hit the ground running when a threat strikes their school community.”

He says the vast majority of school threats are empty. Often it comes from kids claiming they did it as a joke and didn’t mean it. But the police have no choice but to respond to every call, which costs taxpayers significant amounts of money.

There’s no way to put a dollar amount on the losses incurred from these false threats, Trump says. But there’s also the costs of lost instruction time, and the heavy emotional costs to distracted students, worried teachers, and anxious parents.

Trump says the study found an emerging trend of threats made by individuals outside of schools who are trying to distract the police from community-based crimes.

“We saw seven incidents of school threats in the study that were linked to bank robberies that were used to distract law enforcement in one form or another,” he says.

Trump says some perpetrators send threats through international proxy servers to hide their identity. By that method, messages are sent from the states to an international server in another country and then relayed back to a school district. Trump says that makes identifying the perpetrator difficult but it’s not impossible.

Fortunately, the vast majority of threat-makers are eventually apprehended, according to Trump. It may take the FBI several days to do so, though. And he says with each day the investigation continues, community anxiety continues to grow.

He says he spends a great deal of time talking to educators about proactively discussing safety before a crisis occurs. So he’s disappointed that many school websites have pages and pages of information about academics and the different departments and offices. But he has not seen one page dedicated to school safety and emergency planning.

Trump says the use of social media is a two-edged sword. While it can be used negatively to send violent threats it can also be used positively. He thinks school administrators and first responders are adapting to use those same tools in a positive way to get information out in order to counter the misinformation and relieve the tension and anxiety.

“It’s a matter of fighting fire with fire,” he says.