Technology complicates school threats

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Tech-savvy students and others are using smartphone apps, social media and Internet phone services to make anonymous reports of bombs and other threats of violence at schools. The result: school evacuations and police sweeps.

In most cases, such a threat turns out to be a hoax. Still, the use of the modern technologies has made it that much harder to determine if a threat is real and to find the culprit, compared to the past when they were often called in by pay phone or written on bathroom walls.

Just this week, a 16-year-old from Gateway High School in Kissimmee, Fla., was arrested for posting about a bomb threat on Twitter because “she was angry and did not want to go to school,” according to the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office.

School-safety experts say the number of such incidents appears to be increasing — as is the complexity of the cases. The latest figures from the National Center for Education Statistics for the 2009-10 school year show 5,700 such disruptions.

The motivations of the threat makers vary: avoiding a test, revenge or simply to show off.

It’s not too difficult for students to figure out how to pull off such an incident, said Justin Cappos, a computer science professor at New York University who studies cybersecurity. “You wander to the wrong parts of the Internet and you can learn how to do it and not get caught,” Cappos said.

Every threat has to be taken seriously even though in most cases the called-in danger is not real, said David Pennington, superintendent of schools in Ponca City, Okla., and president of the AASA School Superintendents Association.