All Los Angeles Unified School District schools have been ordered closed Tuesday due to a “credible threat” of violence to students at numerous schools in the sprawling district, and a schools official confirmed that it was a bomb threat to the school district.
Los Angeles Unified is the nation’s second-largest school district, with more than 900 campuses and more than 640,000 students. Ramon Cortines, the school system’s superintendent, said the threat was against students at multiple schools. LAUSD spokeswoman Monica Carazo confirmed that it was a bomb threat.
“It was not to one school, two schools or three schools, it was many schools, not specifically identified, but there were many schools,” Cortines said. “That’s the reason that I took the action that I did.”
This behavior could make for a long school year. If it works once and there is no threat, then what happens? Closing down a school system with 600,000 students must be the worst nightmare in the world. Do they do it every time a threat is called in?
My understanding is that the threat was electronically communicated to one school board member in particular. I think the story is changing. New York is also on high alert.
TV says the “threat is being analyzed,” whatever that means.
Back to school today in Los Angeles. Declared a hoax at both ends of the country. There are bound to be more of these. And administrators and police are going to be sweating it every time.
ISIS has proclaimed themselves highly amused by the mass school closing in Los Angeles, even as they wipe the dust out of their eyes and remove the splinters from their teeth as their “capital” of Raqqa begins to crumble literally under the combined air assault.
That was a hard one to call. There will always be criticism also. Better to err on the side of caution. LA was still stinging from San Bernadino.
I agree. There will be more and I don’t know what you do about it. It isn’t just ISIS that we have to worry about either.
I like this part that you said:
This is one of the those your damned if you do and damned if you don’t situations. I think that with LA being in such close proximity with San Bernardino as well as terrorist Syed Farook having detailed pictures of public schools on his phone they did the right thing here.
However, the question is… will they do the same thing if a similar threat is made next week/month?
I agree. As for the future….I see a huge problem on the horizon. Every nut case in the world is going to target the LA school system.
what an ordeal. I think they made the right choice. I am all for erring on the side of caution when it come to school safety.
@Moon-howler
How do you think local leaders should handle these situations going forward? They can’t possibly close schools every time a school board member gets a threatening email. It looks like we agree on both aspects of this event, LA did the right thing but it could lead to a huge problem on the horizon.
I wonder… if San Bernardino did not happen would they have gone the safe route and closed all of the schools?
I don’t know. I think what threw them off was that the IP address originated from Germany. Now, on the other hand, how hard is that to do…with a proxy server.
I don’t know what kind of information they were dealing with when the situation arose.
So to answer your question…I honestly don’t know. I have no idea how it should be handled in the future other than to assess the given information at the time.
It’s really a tough call.
At least they don’t have snow days. I guess they have earthquake days instead?