This article originally appeared in WFAE reporter Ann Doss Helms' weekly education newsletter. To get the latest school news in your inbox first, sign up for our email newsletters here.
I’d taken a vacation day on Sept. 22, when a false report of an active shooter at Ardrey Kell High mobilized armed police, first responders and a crowd of terrified parents. When I returned last week, I looked into it as an example of a trend playing out across the state and nation.
I ended up with more questions than answers. For instance: Police said afterward that the call — a report that someone was on campus, shooting people with an automatic weapon — is similar to false reports received at schools across the country. So, who does that? Are these a bunch of pranksters who can hide their identity and do this for kicks? Or — and I felt like putting on a tinfoil hat as my mind drifted down this path — could this come from nefarious entities trying to spread fear and chaos in America?
Special Agent Brian Neil of the State Bureau of Investigation says the answer is both.
“We’ve been able to show where some of these threats do come from outside the United States. It’s just a way of disrupting our society,” he told me Thursday. “But a lot of times they’re inside the United States. A lot of times it’s teenagers just being teenagers.”
Neil heads the SBI’s Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which is part of a national Fusion Center network. It brings together federal, state and local agencies to analyze and head off terrorism and crime, including school shootings.
False threats to schools are nothing new; in my generation teens sneaked off to pay phones to call in bomb threats on test days. But Neil says threats picked up after students returned from pandemic lockdowns. He says last school year his center logged 398 false threats to North Carolina schools, with the most common type being social media posts warning that someone was bringing a gun to school.
“It’s a weekly thing, and some weeks it’s every day,” he said.
But false reports of an active shooter inside a school are also growing, he said. It seems to be a spinoff of the “swatting” trend that emerged when online gamers would call in reports of violent crime or hostage-taking at a fellow player’s house, then watch through the shared video link as armed police kicked in doors.
Quick communication, serious response
Neil says Fusion Centers are working to make sure schools across the country know about threats in real-time, making it easier to know when there’s a pattern. For instance, he says, when a series of identical bomb threats came to historically Black colleges and universities across the country in 2022, many of the HBCUs knew what was happening before they got the threats.
It’s not clear how quickly officials with Charlotte-Mecklenburg police and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools suspected the Ardrey Kell report was a hoax. My guess is it happened pretty fast, especially when an identical call reported a shooter at Community House Middle School across the street. But no one can assume any threat is bogus. School bombings are rare, but Education Week has tallied 30 school shootings so far in 2023, resulting in the deaths of 12 students and four adults, as well as 32 people injured.
So the police and the mass casualty mobile unit moved in, which fueled the fears of students, staff and parents that a real tragedy was playing out. Fortunately the rush of emergency vehicles and frantic parents didn’t lead to serious wrecks — one of many risks that swatting creates, along with a colossal waste of resources and an emotional toll beyond reckoning.
Controlling misinformation amid fear
Neil says one of the first ways law enforcement picks up on a real shooting is when multiple messages come from inside a school, either to 911 dispatchers or through loved ones who get calls. But that instant communication becomes a problem when a false threat gets amplified and exaggerated.
At a back-to-school safety conference this summer, Karen Fairley of the North Carolina Center for Safer Schools told reporters that parents should avoid sharing information on social media and instead should call police or their child’s school to verify information. But … really? Is it reasonable to think that school staff and police dispatchers could have handled calls from the families of about 3,500 Ardrey Kell students, or that they’d have had meaningful information to share before police had swept the building? Or to expect parents who are getting frantic texts from their kids to avoid seeking immediate answers wherever they can find them, including on social media?
Likewise, schools are in a nearly impossible bind. Ardrey Kell Principal Jamie Brooks, one of the best communicators I’ve worked with, sent a message to parents about 20 minutes after the school got the report of a shooter. It said the school was on lockdown and “there is possibly an armed person on campus.” It was another half hour before police used social media (and talked to parents on site) to say the threat appeared to be false. That 50 minutes or so felt like an eternity to families who weren’t sure their kids were safe.
So for now, schools and law enforcement are just trying to get a step ahead of the folks who enjoy spreading panic. Neil says false threats at schools have become such a national problem that the Fusion Centers are talking about creating a national database. North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction doesn’t track threats and false reports. Only bomb threats are part of the annual school crime and violence report mandated by the General Assembly.
