Speaker 1: There's two things happening.
Speaker 2: One thing is there's real things that happen, real tragic
Speaker 2: school shootings, and everybody is aware of when they happen,
Speaker 2: and so that's in the back of everyone's mind, from
Speaker 2: student all the way through everyone else in the district.
Speaker 2: But then there's these fake incidents that equally take a
Speaker 2: toll because we have to communicate them, we have to
Speaker 2: respond to them.
Speaker 3: From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio, it's the big take, I'm
Speaker 3: West Kasova today, a new kind of intruder in America's schools.
Speaker 3: Drills to prepare for an active shooter are now sadly
Speaker 3: a routine part of life for students and teachers across
Speaker 3: the US, And if that weren't stressful enough, schools are
Speaker 3: now seeing a sharp increase in the number of false
Speaker 3: threat It's like bomb scares or reports of violence that
Speaker 3: are intended to create chaos. The police rush in, the school,
Speaker 3: goes into lockdown, and kids and their parents are unnerved. Today,
Speaker 3: Bloomberg cybersecurity reporter Jeff Stone tells us about the proliferation
Speaker 3: of these swatting events.
Speaker 4: That's what they're called for less than one hundred dollars
Speaker 4: in some cases, these services will say that we will
Speaker 4: dial this school or this business and we will make
Speaker 4: X kind of threat.
Speaker 3: And later in the show, you.
Speaker 2: Know, there's the securing of the building itself, but then
Speaker 2: there's the where did this message come from part of it,
Speaker 2: and so that's something that we would do with the police.
Speaker 3: That's Matt Landahl. He's a school superintendent in New York
Speaker 3: who's had to send his schools into lockdown twice in
Speaker 3: the last two months after swatters threatened violence. Jeff, let's
Speaker 3: just start with the BaseX. What is a swatting incident?
Speaker 4: A swatting incident roughly is and there's a false report.
Speaker 4: Often it's a hoax of someone phoning in a emergency
Speaker 4: to a local police department. Often that police department will
Speaker 4: then respond in force, whether it be a swat team
Speaker 4: or officers with guns drawn to a school, to a home.
Speaker 4: Residents or business People on the internet often are phoning
Speaker 4: in these fake events and reporting an active shooter situation
Speaker 4: that doesn't seem to exist, or a bomb threat or
Speaker 4: another emergency that would really induce the kind of panic
Speaker 4: that no one would want to experience in their life.
Speaker 3: And they call this swatting because it's kind of calling
Speaker 3: in the SWAT team.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 4: So the result is that you might be a principal
Speaker 4: or a teacher or a student at a school. Everything's
Speaker 4: going completely normally, and then the trucks pull in. There
Speaker 4: are helicopters hovering overhead. There is a fleet of emergency vehicles,
Speaker 4: multiple fire departments responding to an emergency that doesn't exist.
Speaker 3: Jeff, We're seeing this happening all over the country, and
Speaker 3: it's happening a lot. What exactly is going on?
Speaker 4: There have been four hundred and one documented false reports
Speaker 4: of this kind since the beginning of the school year
Speaker 4: back in September. To give you an idea of the
Speaker 4: magnitude of that growth, In twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, there
Speaker 4: were sixty nine false reports of this kind. You know,
Speaker 4: in the fall of twenty nineteen, just prior to the
Speaker 4: coronavirus shutting so many schools down, there were twenty two reports.
Speaker 4: Compared to this past fall, there were two hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty six. When I was a kid, you know, a
Speaker 4: generation ago, it wasn't as urgent, that threat didn't seem
Speaker 4: as real as it actually could be today, whereas now
Speaker 4: there's generations of kids that are growing up with the
Speaker 4: specter of violence, real or imagined, hanging over their normal
Speaker 4: school day. It's the kind of thing that researchers are
Speaker 4: trying to understand possible effects of trauma on academic work
Speaker 4: and psychology, emotional health, that kind of thing. It's very
Speaker 4: difficult in track.
Speaker 3: Really, especially when we have a situation now where there
Speaker 3: are so many school shootings that teachers are being trained,
Speaker 3: that schools are buying all sorts of equipment to protect
Speaker 3: kids if this happens. You see things like backpacks that
Speaker 3: have bulletproof linings in them, and so if somebody calls
Speaker 3: in a threat, they're going to take it seriously, even
Speaker 3: if it doesn't sound credible.
Speaker 4: You can't be the principal or the teacher who says
Speaker 4: this isn't happening, because the stakes of being wrong are
Speaker 4: so high, you know, literally can cost you know, many
Speaker 4: lives in the event that you're wrong. So the cost
Speaker 4: of your day being disrupted by an emergency situation is
Speaker 4: still better than the alternative, you know, in the event
Speaker 4: that you're wrong about that. There seems to be a
Speaker 4: few factors at play here. One of them is that
Speaker 4: one incident like this begets more incidents the copycat problem exactly.
Speaker 4: Just like when there's a actual school shooting, there are
Speaker 4: further threats of other school shootings, you know, real or
Speaker 4: imagine again around the country that seems to be happening here.
Speaker 4: What's also happening here is there appears to be more coordination.
Speaker 4: We know of the FBI is investigating, we know there's
Speaker 4: all kinds of police forces investigating. Because if there's one
Speaker 4: incident in say rural New York State, that same county
Speaker 4: will be affected in multiple schools over span of days.
Speaker 4: Then it goes away for a while, it might hit
Speaker 4: somewhere else, say Texas, Michigan, somewhere in California, and the
Speaker 4: problem continues to spread in clusters around the nation rather
Speaker 4: than single schools.
Speaker 3: And did they think that this is organized or that
Speaker 3: this is happening a lot but by a lot of
Speaker 3: different people, a little bit of both.
Speaker 4: There appears to be some evidence that there are individuals
Speaker 4: doing this within the United States. There have been a
Speaker 4: number of young people ages you know, sixteen, even a
Speaker 4: little bit younger up to early twenties calling in fake
Speaker 4: threats like this. There's not a lot known about this,
Speaker 4: but there's also some evidence that people are using voice
Speaker 4: disguising technology from outside the country trying to influence local
Speaker 4: police departments within the United States to play on very
Speaker 4: real and existing fears of violence and schools.
Speaker 3: Jeff, you've reported on one school called Granite City High School.
Speaker 3: Can you tell us what happened there?
Speaker 4: On the morning of April twelve, students and teachers in
Speaker 4: Granite City High in Granite City, Illinois were sitting down
Speaker 4: for tests and getting ready for SATs, the dreaded college
Speaker 4: admissions eligibility tests, and all psyched up ready to go.
Speaker 4: There were about fifteen hundred students on hand that day,
Speaker 4: plus staff, teachers, and administrators. Everything seemed to be going normally.
Speaker 4: It was a nice day. When two police helicopters started
Speaker 4: floating overhead. Ultimately sixteen law enforcement agencies were on hand.
Speaker 4: They kind of appeared out of the blue, according to
Speaker 4: the superintendent. It turns out someone had called in a
Speaker 4: fake active show to the local police department. Rather than
Speaker 4: calling nine to one one, they used a non emergency
Speaker 4: phone line, triggering this response. The police department apparently did
Speaker 4: not communicate with the school. They appeared at the school
Speaker 4: fully ready to go, armed, swept through the hallways. School
Speaker 4: students were on lockdown, a lot of kids were held
Speaker 4: in their testing rooms and really going through all of
Speaker 4: the procedures that you would expect in the event that
Speaker 4: there was a real event. Ultimately, the police were in
Speaker 4: and out within a few hours, but still testing was rescheduled.
Speaker 4: Kids had to go home to their parents. Parents were
Speaker 4: crying in the parking lot. Community wide disruption, and.
Speaker 3: You talked to the superintendent of the school and she
Speaker 3: was pretty rattled.
Speaker 4: She still rattled a few weeks later. She also said, Hey,
Speaker 4: by the way, this happened before. So while this is
Speaker 4: the first time in Granite City, this has happened in
Speaker 4: previous schools in the community. So a lot of the
Speaker 4: teachers who had prior roles at those educational institutions, this superintendent,
Speaker 4: they're still being brought back to a negative place in
Speaker 4: their mind about prior threats like this. They're happening all
Speaker 4: over the country. Buffalo, New York, just went through a
Speaker 4: big cluster of these. The school superintendent there sent out
Speaker 4: a proactive alert saying, we're aware of this issue popping
Speaker 4: up all over the US. We know the FBI is investigating,
Speaker 4: we know that there was a cluster in Nevada, affecting
Speaker 4: some colleges and universities. We know that in Harvard there
Speaker 4: were four young men who were held at gunpoint in
Speaker 4: their dorm by police that thought they were responding to
Speaker 4: a incident like this.
Speaker 3: Jeff, obviously, with this is affecting hundreds of schools, that's
Speaker 3: a lot of teachers, a lot of administrators. What are
Speaker 3: you hearing from them about their day to day lives
Speaker 3: living under this constant threat that they could have their
Speaker 3: day overturned.
Speaker 4: We know that it is exhausting. I spoke with one
Speaker 4: superintendent who after an incident earlier this month, said that
Speaker 4: she was crying in her office on what started as
Speaker 4: a normal day and she saw students running out and
Speaker 4: embracing their parents. Everyone was crying. You have to remember
Speaker 4: that a lot of these educators, in particular, are coming
Speaker 4: off of a really tough couple of years as it is,
Speaker 4: thanks to the coronavirus. We know that teachers are dealing
Speaker 4: with a lot of burnout and oftentimes don't have a
Speaker 4: ton of resources to begin with, So this really is
Speaker 4: another layer of pain and difficulty. On top of all
Speaker 4: of that, local police departments also are trying to get
Speaker 4: up to speed on a kind of cybercrime that typically
Speaker 4: has fallen under the jurisdiction of the FBI or federal
Speaker 4: law enforcement. This is a difficult thing to investigate when
Speaker 4: some of these fake threats come in. It's using a
Speaker 4: kind of technology that is not easy to detect by
Speaker 4: reverse dialing a number, for instance, or trying to locate
Speaker 4: where someone is. So it's a huge challenge. It's a
Speaker 4: lot of frustration. It's leading to a more urgency in
Speaker 4: terms of community collaboration between schools and police departments and
Speaker 4: practicing for scenarios like this.
Speaker 3: Do they have much success in catching people given how
Speaker 3: hard it is, like in Granite City? Did they ever
Speaker 3: find out who did it?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: We know that police departments in the FBI are investigating
Speaker 4: this with a lot of urgency. For the hundreds of
Speaker 4: swatting incidents that have occurred that we know of this year,
Speaker 4: only a handful of people have been arrested, and often
Speaker 4: their charge with a kind of mischief or making terroristic threats.
Speaker 4: There doesn't appear to be a lot of coordination between
Speaker 4: the suspects who have been arrested over the past few months.
Speaker 4: This is a generational problem for the Internet. It used
Speaker 4: to be that individuals would be targeted with swatting incidents.
Speaker 4: We know of one guy allegedly who had hacked Amazon's
Speaker 4: ring doorbells and would phone in fake swatting incidents, and
Speaker 4: when the police would arrive, they'd be standing outside someone's
Speaker 4: home and this perpetrator would taunt the police through the
Speaker 4: ring doorbell, just completely infuriating the officers who thought they
Speaker 4: were responding to a hostage scenario.
Speaker 3: When we come back, swatting has now become a business, Jeff.
Speaker 3: It's not just individuals who are calling in these false threads. Unbelievably,
Speaker 3: there are automated swatting services that a person can pay
Speaker 3: to create a swatting event for them. What is that
Speaker 3: and how does it work.
Speaker 4: There's a kind of technology called voice over IP tech
Speaker 4: that has been available for years. Essentially, what that allows
Speaker 4: you to do is disguise your real phone number and
Speaker 4: use a specific area code so that it looks like
Speaker 4: you're calling from an area where they're actually receiving the call.
Speaker 4: A lot of your listeners might be familiar with the
Speaker 4: kind of spam or marketing calls that already use this
Speaker 4: kind of thing. That make it more likely that you'll
Speaker 4: pick up your phone if it's from a local caller. Concerningly,
Speaker 4: there are automated services that are available on different kinds
Speaker 4: of chat apps, in different illicit channels that to essentially
Speaker 4: launch a swatting incident for you for less than one
Speaker 4: hundred dollars. In some cases, these services will say that
Speaker 4: we will dial this school or this business and we
Speaker 4: will make X kind of threat, and we expect this
Speaker 4: result to happen, whether it be somebody being arrested, or
Speaker 4: oftentimes they imply that someone might be hurt. So it's
Speaker 4: not quite the level of hiring a hitman, but it
Speaker 4: is the kind of thing that has had fatal consequences
Speaker 4: in the past.
Speaker 3: You also talked about how some of these calls seem
Speaker 3: to have originated from overseas, which is a whole different
Speaker 3: kind of thing. Our investigators looking into the possibility that
Speaker 3: this is organized threats by foreign governments just looking to
Speaker 3: cause kind of mayhem in disruption.
Speaker 4: There's no indication that we're aware of that there's a
Speaker 4: foreign government behind this. It does seem like some of
Speaker 4: this activities is coordinated by people who certainly know what
Speaker 4: they're doing. What makes swatting a little bit different from
Speaker 4: a more typical threat is that there's no clear monetary
Speaker 4: gain if you are launching a swatting incident from overseas,
Speaker 4: wherever that might be. What you're essentially doing is creating
Speaker 4: chaos and confusion and fear in a community, But there's
Speaker 4: not a lot of extortion that always goes into it,
Speaker 4: or the kind of sal of stolen information that you
Speaker 4: might typically expect from a hacking incident. This is a
Speaker 4: little more nuanced.
Speaker 3: I suppose, though. If you're using one of these services
Speaker 3: to hire someone to create a swatting incident for you,
Speaker 3: there's no telling where that person is. A lot of
Speaker 3: the call centers where scams come in, where they try
Speaker 3: to swindle people out of money, those are based overseas.
Speaker 4: That's correct, And we know that a lot of the
Speaker 4: people who are doing this kind of activity are using
Speaker 4: virtual private networks, which are a really good way at
Speaker 4: cloaking your location and ensuring that it's really difficult to
Speaker 4: identify what kind of computer you're contacting them from or
Speaker 4: what your true number is. So that's another complicating step
Speaker 4: for investigators.
Speaker 3: So politicians are obviously starting to take notice of this
Speaker 3: victually locally.
Speaker 5: And I want to reassure parents that the State of
Speaker 5: New York takes us very seriously. It is incredibly, incredibly
Speaker 5: stressed on our families at this time, and there's nothing
Speaker 5: we want more than to restore some sense of common
Speaker 5: normalcy for our kids who've been through so much over
Speaker 5: the last few years.
Speaker 3: What is the response from elected official has.
Speaker 4: Been so far panic and a scramble to show that
Speaker 4: they are paying attention. The solutions, frankly, are difficult to
Speaker 4: discern how they will make a major difference, But I
Speaker 4: think that a lot of the goal here is to
Speaker 4: kind of start a conversation about this larger problem and
Speaker 4: ensure that schools and administrators and teachers are trained for
Speaker 4: situations where if they need to be in contact with
Speaker 4: the police, they're able to do that efficiently. In some cases,
Speaker 4: researchers and school safety experts are recommending that schools will
Speaker 4: go through simple tasks like making sure that everyone knows
Speaker 4: where the emergency exit is, which isn't always clear, or
Speaker 4: ensuring that everyone can hear the PA system, or ensuring
Speaker 4: that a superintendent is able to quickly reach parents to
Speaker 4: assuage any concerns about an active shooter. Situation and remind
Speaker 4: them that it isn't real.
Speaker 3: As you're reporting on this story, and I imagine you're
Speaker 3: gonna be writing about it quite a lot, what's the
Speaker 3: next thing that we should be watching for.
Speaker 4: We are trying to understand more about the perpetrators and
Speaker 4: really the motive behind some of these crimes. We know
Speaker 4: that when there are teenagers or young people who are
Speaker 4: behind this kind of thing, a lot of the explanation
Speaker 4: is that their brains aren't fully developed. You know, it
Speaker 4: might be more interesting to be standing outside while the
Speaker 4: police sweep your school than to be sitting in third
Speaker 4: period and taking an exam that you didn't study for.
Speaker 4: There does those seem to be a level of coordination,
Speaker 4: as you alluded to, that is indicative of a larger
Speaker 4: problem that we and perhaps you know, more organized police
Speaker 4: forces with subpoena power don't fully grasp the meaning of yet.
Speaker 3: Jeff, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 3: When we come back, we hear from a school superintendent
Speaker 3: who's had to deal with these swatting events. Our supervising producer,
Speaker 3: Vicki Vigolina, has two kids in middle school and she's
Speaker 3: experienced these school swatting incidents twice in the last two months.
Speaker 3: Along with her husband and kids and all the other parents,
Speaker 3: teachers and administrators. She spoke to her district superintendent of schools.
Speaker 2: My name is Matts Landall and I'm the superintendent of
Speaker 2: the beacon Cy School District.
Speaker 3: Here's their conversation about what actually happens when a threat
Speaker 3: is called in.
Speaker 6: Doctor Landall, you have been leading this district since twenty seventeen.
Speaker 6: You let it through the outbreak of COVID, you let
Speaker 6: it through online schooling and the slow but short return
Speaker 6: to classes. But recently you are, along with many other
Speaker 6: school leaders around the country, navigating a new sort of chaos,
Speaker 6: which is these calls to the district involving threats to
Speaker 6: the schools. What happens when you receive this call, when
Speaker 6: you receive a threat like this, what has to happen logistically?
Speaker 2: Well, the one we got in February, the call actually
Speaker 2: went into the police department instead of us, and so
Speaker 2: they were both notifying us that they received the call
Speaker 2: and rushing over.
Speaker 1: To the school to see what was going on or
Speaker 1: to intervene.
Speaker 2: The one we had where recently was like an online
Speaker 2: comment on an online site, and so that was then
Speaker 2: forwarded to us. We have a full time director of
Speaker 2: security in our district and he's pretty much on call
Speaker 2: twenty four to seven along with us, and so we
Speaker 2: called him that evening and then he kind of helps us, lease,
Speaker 2: I'm with the police, and so he immediately started working
Speaker 2: with the police. There's a lot of circumstance around how
Speaker 2: you respond to each one, but you obviously respond immediately
Speaker 2: and you do kind of trigger all the training and.
Speaker 1: Practice and what's in our plan.
Speaker 2: What I found over the years in dealing with this
Speaker 2: and these ones more recently are obviously pretty troubling, but
Speaker 2: you never know when it's coming and you just respond
Speaker 2: right away.
Speaker 1: And what's great is there's a bunch.
Speaker 2: Of other people who kind of have that twenty four
Speaker 2: to seven part of their job, and so you know,
Speaker 2: the police are always there no matter what time, and
Speaker 2: administrators are on call, and we just start working through it.
Speaker 2: The last part of it is once you've started to
Speaker 2: figure out what to do, you start really working on
Speaker 2: how you communicate it to obviously staff, but also then
Speaker 2: to parents and how quickly can you do that, And
Speaker 2: so it's something unfortunately we have a fair amount of
Speaker 2: practice doing and like I said, everyone is like a
Speaker 2: little different.
Speaker 6: And what has to be established to get sort of
Speaker 6: that all clear. At what point do you feel confident
Speaker 6: to communicate to the community, Hey, we're all okay.
Speaker 2: You know, there's the securing of the building itself, but
Speaker 2: then there's the where did this message come from part
Speaker 2: of it, and so that's something that we would do
Speaker 2: with the police, and then that's something we can communicate out,
Speaker 2: and that is, you know, the police going through a
Speaker 2: building and working with us in terms of making sure
Speaker 2: the building is entirely secure.
Speaker 1: The second part of it.
Speaker 2: Is, you know, what they've been able to get a
Speaker 2: lot better at is they start finding out where the
Speaker 2: message is from. And this is I think police departments
Speaker 2: just not even ours, but just sort of all over
Speaker 2: the place are either doing it themselves or working with
Speaker 2: state entities or federal entities in terms of tracking down
Speaker 2: like IP addresses and working with technology social media companies that.
Speaker 1: All that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: What I found is they've gotten a lot quicker at
Speaker 2: finding out where the either the comment or even the
Speaker 2: phone calls.
Speaker 1: Sometimes that's obviously.
Speaker 2: Not what I'm involved in it all, but they've been
Speaker 2: able to do those things really quickly with us this year,
Speaker 2: and unfortunately, I think it's something they've gotten better at
Speaker 2: dealing with too. But that part has been a good change.
Speaker 2: They're able to get to the bottom pretty quickly.
Speaker 6: I wanted to ask how well equipped personnel wise school
Speaker 6: administrators such as yourself and law enforcement. It sounds like
Speaker 6: you're pretty well equipped to deal with these, but they're
Speaker 6: ever increasing. Has the personnel had to shift?
Speaker 2: Five years ago, it was, you know a few months
Speaker 2: after the Parkland school shooting. We have security monitors or
Speaker 2: cards and all of our schools, but we developed the
Speaker 2: position of directors security.
Speaker 1: So that was a change that was kind of.
Speaker 2: Not a direct response to the Parkland shooting, but everything
Speaker 2: we were dealing with that year we developed that position.
Speaker 2: He's a retired police officer and he's super helpful. Like
Speaker 2: I said, you know, he's on call twenty four to
Speaker 2: seven in a sense to help us deal with stuff.
Speaker 2: So that is a position that probably twenty or thirty
Speaker 2: years ago, like no school district was even thinking of having.
Speaker 1: So that's certainly a new allocation.
Speaker 2: We have, you know, different technology, like pretty sophisticated cameras
Speaker 2: in the schools and security systems and things like that
Speaker 2: that you know, the status helped pay for, but those
Speaker 2: are things that districts weren't thinking about having ten or
Speaker 2: twenty years ago probably either, you know, building principles and
Speaker 2: people like me spend a lot of time on this
Speaker 2: stuff too, And I think it's really just kind of
Speaker 2: become part of the job that day that the more
Speaker 2: recent thing happened.
Speaker 1: It's just like the whole day.
Speaker 2: You just sort of lose that day or more with
Speaker 2: whatever you.
Speaker 1: Had planned for that day. And obviously that's part of
Speaker 1: being a school.
Speaker 2: Administrator or superintendent, so I accept that, but there is
Speaker 2: part of that where it's a newer thing that we
Speaker 2: deal with, and it does seem more frequent now too.
Speaker 6: That's the bit I wanted to also ask you about
Speaker 6: because the personal aspect of all this, You are so
Speaker 6: calm and cool in a situation, and I have experienced
Speaker 6: this personally because I've gotten your robo calls. But when
Speaker 6: you joined Teach for America and decided that education was
Speaker 6: your path, did you see this as part of the trajectory.
Speaker 1: No, I didn't see that part of it. I mean,
Speaker 1: my very first year of being an.
Speaker 2: Administrator, I was like an intern administrator. Was Columbine and
Speaker 2: it kind of changed everything. And so every year I've
Speaker 2: been an administrator, we've been dealing with this in one
Speaker 2: way or another. You know, these swatting calls are coming
Speaker 2: from some bad actors, right, and these are kind of
Speaker 2: for other people to say, but it appears the intent
Speaker 2: is to take a toll on people. And I think
Speaker 2: it takes a toll on parents for sure, and it
Speaker 2: certainly takes a toll on you know, teachers and staff
Speaker 2: members and schools, and it takes a toll on administrators.
Speaker 2: And it takes a toll on our students, like they
Speaker 2: either get the message themselves or their parents or a
Speaker 2: teacher if it's during the day, has to figure out
Speaker 2: a way to talk to them and keep them calm,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: So it's like there's two things happening.
Speaker 2: One thing is there's real things that happen, real tragic
Speaker 2: school shootings, and everybody is aware of when they happen,
Speaker 2: or almost everybody, probably our youngest students are sheltered from it.
Speaker 2: And so that's in the back of everyone's mind, from
Speaker 2: student all the way through everyone else in the district,
Speaker 2: including parents. But then there's these fake incidents that equally
Speaker 2: take a toll because we have to communicate them, we
Speaker 2: have to respond to them. I think in like the
Speaker 2: following our process communicating about it, it takes a toll
Speaker 2: on everyone too, because it's like it causes anxiety and
Speaker 2: it's hard. You know, when I had to make that
Speaker 2: call at five point thirty in the morning a couple
Speaker 2: of weeks ago. Obviously I hate to make any of
Speaker 2: those calls, but I really hated to do that when
Speaker 2: we knew it was the right thing to do. We
Speaker 2: knew everyone needed to know about it, but I also knew,
Speaker 2: like everyone getting that call that early in the morning,
Speaker 2: how it was just going to impact several thousand people.
Speaker 2: And you know, it's hard to sort of know that
Speaker 2: everyone's going to either hug their kid a little bit
Speaker 2: tighter before putting them on the bus, or maybe even
Speaker 2: some keeping their kids at home that day, or you know,
Speaker 2: just all those things, or high school students or middle
Speaker 2: school students talking about what this means for them, and.
Speaker 1: Staff members concerned about coming to work.
Speaker 2: So that's the part where it feels like whoever's doing
Speaker 2: all of this, or the people that are doing this,
Speaker 2: they're taking you know, these real events that happen, and
Speaker 2: they're just sewing more of this anxiety and fear or
Speaker 2: trying to And so I should probably end by saying,
Speaker 2: we really really work hard to really work through these
Speaker 2: incidents and try to be calm and reassuring, and our
Speaker 2: staff I think does an amazing job with that too.
Speaker 6: We should mention you're also a father and your son
Speaker 6: is also in the district, so you know, it's all
Speaker 6: the above for you. Wasn't there an offer of counseling
Speaker 6: when kids came back, especially after the February one where
Speaker 6: it was a little bit more intense. Do you want
Speaker 6: to just speak to that a second, that that's something
Speaker 6: that districts are doing, that's something that you're doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in every district budget over the last probably four
Speaker 2: or five years, we've increased mental health professionals in our district.
Speaker 2: We're doing it again for next year's budget. And the
Speaker 2: need is vast out there. I think that's well established.
Speaker 2: But that being said, what happened at the middle school
Speaker 2: that morning there was this swatting call went to the
Speaker 2: police right at arrival, and so police came over, you know,
Speaker 2: armed and ready to deal with someone trying to cause
Speaker 2: harm in the school and so kids saw the police
Speaker 2: coming out with long guns and fests and everything, and
Speaker 2: that was a traumatic day for a lot of kids
Speaker 2: at the middle school. So and we were able to
Speaker 2: once we established that it was false and everything, parents
Speaker 2: were allowed to pick up their kids throughout that day.
Speaker 2: We kind of put all the district mental health people
Speaker 2: at the ready for the I think that happened on
Speaker 2: a Friday, so they were ready on Monday for the
Speaker 2: return of students. And there was a fair number of
Speaker 2: kids who took us up on the offer and wanted
Speaker 2: to talk to somebody and just talk it through. To
Speaker 2: try to offer a lot of support is like a
Speaker 2: way we can all try to get through this together.
Speaker 6: Well, thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate your time.
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