During a dinner I was having with a retired school administrator, I asked him if he had to handle bomb threats twenty to thirty years ago. He told me that the secretary normally handled them. When I pushed him for more information he basically told me that, sure they got bomb threats but they knew they were pranks and treated them as pranks. He also noted that is a post Columbine world he would do things differently.
So, have kids changed or have our reactions to what the do changed?
In a recent bomb threat at Algonquin we evacuated the students and kept them out of class for over two hours while administration and police investigated the situation. A student was arrested and taken away in handcuffs. The following day we outlawed book bags and began searching purses.
The worst school bombing was in Bath, Michigan in 1927. Did schools throughout the United States develop disaster plans following that event?
Whatever the answer, times are what they are and administrators are expected to react strongly to any threat.
posted by MiddleSchoolPrincipal @ 10:31 AM
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