Dive Brief:
- Anonymous bomb threats and other safety hoaxes can have staggering price tags as districts close schools while attempting to determine their veracity.
- In Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Unified School District's closure of 900 campuses and 187 public charter schools in December cost the district more than $29 million, according to CNBC.
- A significant portion of the expense comes from reimbursing police, as well as paying legal penalties for any student attendance or instructional time violations and losing federal reimbursements for things like school lunches.
Dive Insight:
In these kinds of scenarios, district administrators are certainly caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, they need to take credible threats seriously. But the fiscal consequences have to be considered in tandem with safety concerns.
Recently, a survey by the National School Safety and Security Services found a 158% increase in the number of threats that schools received in 2014 compared to 2013.
The increase spurred some state lawmakers to call for harsher penalties for school threats. For example, Wisconsin state Rep. Ed Brooks proposed legislation "that would make a public death threat a medium-grade felony," while Connecticut state Sen. Tony Hwang wants to reintroduce a bill that would "beef up the state's threatening laws, making them more serious felonies."
It's possible that such sanctions would make threats less common, but for now, districts need to continue to weigh a threat's credibility with the cost of investigations and missed class time.