As School Threats Proliferate, More Than 700 Students Are Arrested

MIDDLETOWN, Ohio — Earlier this month, a detective knocked on Shavon Harvey’s door, in suburban Ohio, to ask about her son. The son had sent a Snapchat message from her phone to his friends, saying there would be shootings at several schools nearby.

She rushed to the police station, where her son was already in custody, but police did not release him. He was charged with inducing panic, a second-degree felony, and officials kept him in detention for 10 nights.

He is 10.

Harvey’s son is far from the only child arrested this month after similar behavior. And he’s not even the youngest.

In the three weeks since two teachers and two students were killed at Apalachee High School in the deadliest school shooting in Georgia’s history, more than 700 children and teenagers, including at least one fourth grader, have been arrested and accused of making violent threats against schools in at least 45 states, according to a New York Times review of news reports, law enforcement statements and court records. Almost 10% were 12 or younger.

The arrests come as police and schools confront an onslaught of threats of violence, gunfire and bombings. The reports have terrified students and their parents, caused attendance to plunge and forced the temporary closure of dozens of campuses. Some schools have canceled homecoming parades, middle school dances and Friday night football games.

In Georgia alone, 98 students in 56 counties were taken into custody within two weeks of the Sept. 4 attack at Apalachee High School.

A high-profile shooting routinely unleashes a wave of copycat threats, and experts expect an uptick at the beginning of every school year. But this fall semester, the combination of the two appears to have amplified the problem.

Over a dozen prosecutors, school safety consultants and district superintendents said in interviews that they were working overtime to investigate social media posts that seem to leap across platforms, broadcasting images of guns, lists of schools and menacing warnings to stay home.

“The number of recirculated, reshared, reposted threats we’re seeing is a number that we’ve never seen before,” said Theresa Campbell, founder and CEO of Safer Schools Together, which trains law enforcement agencies and schools on how to handle threats and maintains a database of social media posts from around the globe.

No single organization tracks all threats of school violence across the United States. And even as threats proliferate across the nation, the vast majority have proved to be unfounded. Incidents of gunfire on school grounds from Sept. 4-20 remained below the average of recent years, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group.

But in one week in September, Arizona schools received 156% more threats than in the same week last year. A county in the Orlando, Florida, suburbs charged 24 students in the first 28 days of school with second-degree felonies for making threats.

And in Ohio, a state school safety center had already received more reports of threats this year than in all of 2023, the vast majority this month.

This generation of young people faces unique troubles that some experts speculate may be exacerbating the trend. They include the lasting effects of the pandemic’s stress and isolation on students, the proliferation of social media in their lives and the pervasiveness of high-profile violence — from school shootings to political assassination attempts.

The havoc has also raised difficult questions about how police should respond. The sheriff of Volusia County, Florida, drew both praise and condemnation nationally last week for posting the names and images of several children accused of making threats to schools.

Christopher Wren, a Phoenix police detective who manages a statewide threat assessment program in Arizona, said that he had not seen so many school threats since creepy clowns terrorized districts across the nation in 2016.

But he worried that arresting so many children could hurt efforts to build trust with young people and encourage them to come forward with concerns. “Not a lot of these kids need to go to jail,” he said, adding, “It sets things back, without a doubt.”

Research shows that even a brief time in detention reduces a child’s likelihood of graduating from high school and increases their probability of being arrested as an adult.

Several experts said that both students and parents were making the problem worse by reposting threats, often in an attempt to warn others, instead of just reporting them to authorities. Reposting can make threats that originated from other states or even other countries appear to be local.

In the last three weeks, a 15-year-old with autism near Orlando was accused of saying while playing the popular video game Fortnite that he would find explosives and blow up a high school. An 11-year-old in southwest Arizona commented on TikTok that a gunman was coming to his elementary school, according to police.

And a high school student in a Milwaukee suburb was charged after posting on Snapchat that if Vice President Kamala Harris won the national election, he would shoot up his high school.

In each instance — as is typical in the overwhelming majority of school threat cases — the warnings were not credible. But police must fully investigate every threat, and the surging numbers have frustrated and exhausted law enforcement agencies. After previous shootings, including the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, and the recent Georgia shooting, law enforcement officials were criticized for ignoring warning signs.

Michael T. Gmoser, the prosecuting attorney in Butler County, Ohio, where Harvey’s 10-year-old son was charged, argued that “this is not somebody who’s filching a dime pack of gum from a drugstore.”

“I realize it’s just a child,” Gmoser added. “I just know what the consequences are for adults. How many people have to lose time at their work to pay attention to a threat of a school system?”

After Harvey’s son was released from juvenile detention Friday, he spoke in his home about how his friends “always like to pull stupid pranks.” He said he had not understood the severity of his social media message.

“I thought they would warn me and tell me not do it again,” said the 10-year-old, who has not yet been ruled fit to stand trial. Harvey agreed to talk to a reporter about the situation because she was frustrated by the response from law enforcement, but is using her middle name to protect her son’s identity.

“You can’t play like that,” his mother responded. “That’s a serious thing when you threaten a school.”

But Harvey said she was also infuriated over the severity of the crackdown. Her teenage children were also pulled from school and searched by officers, and her 10-year-old was “scared and confused” when he was questioned at the police station without her.

He had never been in serious trouble before, she said.

“I feel like they’re using my son to make an example,” Harvey said. “He made a big mistake. But you’re not about to label him like he’s a murderer or a menace to society.”

Experts on school violence caution against a one-size-fits-all approach to these cases.

Dewey G. Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist and education professor at the University of Virginia who trains threat assessment teams in schools, said that law enforcement officials should consider several factors, including a student’s age, the nature of a threat and the intent behind it.

“Treating all threats the same is not a good practice,” Cornell said.

Cornell said that students might make threats as a “joke,” to win attention from their peers or to intimidate classmates and cause disruption. In a small number of cases, a threat could be a harbinger of a serious intent to commit violence.

Still, even threats meant as a joke can produce real harm, experts and school officials acknowledged. School districts already dealing with student stress and increases in absenteeism and misbehavior said the anxiety produced by threats and lockdowns was only making matters worse.

The superintendent of the 65,000-student district in Virginia Beach, Donald E. Robertson, said some students had suffered anxiety attacks in class after a slew of local threats.

He wondered if “we’re still seeing the aftereffects” of the pandemic, when schools across the nation found more students having trouble regulating their emotions and higher rates of issues like depression and mental distress.

Experts said that the surge in threats might indicate that many students needed counseling and mental health services. Even frivolous threats of violence “could be a signal of underlying emotional issues,” said Deborah M. Weisbrot, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University who has studied the young people who make these remarks.

Some school counselors said that they were finding more teenagers who seemed desensitized to violence after seeing so much online and in the media. Others worry about young people who have not grasped, even in a heavily online culture, that comments on the internet can carry acute consequences.

District officials also said too many schools are understaffed and lack the funding to adequately identify and support what appears to be a growing number of children who need help.

Alyse Ley, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Michigan State University and the director of a program aimed at preventing adolescent targeted violence, said that “behavior is a way of communicating” — and that it is the job of adults to figure out what students are trying to say.

Lately, she added, it seems that “kids are screaming out for help.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .