False alarm: School threats spike after deadly Florida high school shooting

“Help,” she whispers, whimpering into the phone.

The 911 operator asks for her address, but the girl doesn’t give it. “He’s got a gun,” she says instead. “He’s got the gun in my mouth.”

A second caller says in a hushed voice that police need to get to Withrow University High School in Hyde Park “real quick.”

A third says there’s a shooter somewhere in the school.

Between 9:12 and 9:44 a.m. this past Thursday – a week and a day after a gunman killed 17 at a Florida high school – police got nine 911 calls about Withrow.

It was all a hoax.

More:Florida sheriff: School campus had armed officer who never encountered suspected shooter

In the Cincinnati region and across the nation, schools are seeing a rash of threats following the Florida shooting. In some cases, kids clearly think they're being funny. In others, it's more difficult to determine how serious is the intent. 

There are no state or national databases tracking school threats, so exact data is hard to come by. But the Ohio-based Educator’s School Safety Network does its best to keep a list, mostly using media reports.

On a typical day, the network tracks roughly 10 or 11 school threats nationwide, said Director of Programs Amy Klinger.

On the first six weekdays following the Florida shooting, the average was 66 threats a day, a 503 percent increase from normal.

There is always a spike after a school shooting, Klinger said, but these numbers are unusually intense. She thinks it reflects the intensity of the Florida shooting, one of the worst in America’s history, and the intensity of the conversation surrounding school safety and gun laws.

People are paying attention, Klinger said, and students interested in causing chaos know that now is their time.

“I would expect this to continue for a while,” she said.

‘The first one on my list’

In Greater Cincinnati, the jump is clear.

The Enquirer requested reports from 15 police and sheriff’s offices around the region, in Ohio and Northern Kentucky. We asked for reports from any time officers were asked to respond to a school, then we tossed out anything that wasn’t related to a threat – officers helping with security at a basketball game, for example, or assisting with after-school traffic or an unruly student.

We examined a three-week period – the two weeks leading up to the Florida shooting and the week immediately following – using our own reporting and sources inside the schools to supplement what we got from police. 

There are some caveats to the results. First, not every department provided the records. The Cincinnati Police Department could not run the reports, saying the department covers too many schools to feasibly do such a search. The Boone County Sheriff’s Office said it would need more time to comply, and the Hamilton County and Clermont County sheriffs' offices did not respond to our request. 

Second, for our analysis, we counted only threats that fell in that three-week period. The Withrow 911 calls, for example, fell one day after and thus are not included in these totals.  

Third, it is still unlikely we are counting every single threat. Some threats might have been classified as something else or handled internally. Others were perhaps never seen by school officials or never reported to law enforcement.

Keeping that in mind, here is what we found:

In the two weeks prior to the Florida shooting, from Jan. 31 to Feb. 14, area schools received at least 10 threats, as documented in police and media reports.

In the week following the shooting, area schools received at least 21 threats. That’s more than twice as many in half the time.

On Feb. 15, the day after the Florida shooting, a female student at Boone County High School threatened to bring a gun to school and shoot people in the head. She was charged with terroristic threatening.

On Feb. 19, a girl at R. A. Jones Middle School in Boone County was charged with terroristic threatening after she told a teacher she wanted to shoot up everyone in the school. When the teacher said that was extremely inappropriate, especially given what happened in Florida, the girl responded, “Gee I wonder why he did it” and went on to name which teacher would be “the first one on my list.”

On Feb. 20, a boy at Edgewood High School in Butler County was in the lunchroom when he said that if he shot up the school, he could get more than 17 students, the total number of students and adults killed in the Florida shooting. The Edgewood student was charged with inducing panic.

Schools adding security 

There is an overall spike, but there also seem to be pockets of threats in particular districts. During a two-week stretch, Boone County Schools alone got seven threats, some against individual students and others threatening violence on a larger scale.

Superintendent Randy Poe said the district hasn’t seen an uptick in student discipline, but the reports of inducing panic and terroristic threatening are making waves.

“There’s a heightened sense of unrest,” he said.

The district already had sheriff’s deputies stationed at middle and high schools, but starting this past Monday Feb. 26 and for the rest of the school year, those deputies will be at elementary schools, too, Poe said. None of the recent threats in Boone County has been against an elementary school, but Poe hopes the deputies’ presence will help quell parent fears.

Still, it’s a temporary and partial fix, Poe said. School safety is a lot more complicated than these questions. Are there armed police in the halls? Should we or shouldn’t we arm teachers? Are we doing enough with mental health to catch would-be killers ahead of time?

Those debates are fine and good, Poe said, but for schools, the bottom line is this: There isn’t enough money to do more.  And until that changes, nothing changes.

Students arrested, charged

Sometime Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, Cincinnati Public Schools received social media threats about bombs at several high schools – Withrow, Western Hills and Shroder. So, those schools, though not on lockdown, were already on high alert Thursday morning, said district spokeswoman Lauren Worley.

Then, the 911 calls started coming in about Withrow. The school was put on lockdown immediately, and no students were allowed in or out, Worley said. Lights were turned off in classrooms. Once police determined the calls were coming from inside the school, students were prohibited from using their cellphones.

Hyde Park Elementary, just a few blocks away, was also put on lockdown as a precaution.

It was a major disruption and a huge waste of time and police resources, Worley said.

“From a security standpoint, we never treated it as a hoax,” she said. “… Imagine a student who may have had a test that day, who may have had to present for a project that day, maybe had a big game that night or a band concert. It’s a total distraction to them and their learning.”

More:Listen to 'hoax' 911 calls that prompted Withrow High School lockdown

A Withrow student, a 13-year-old girl, was arrested and charged with inducing panic regarding the threats. That investigation is ongoing, and more students could be arrested.

In Ohio, inducing panic is a second-degree felony. Each case would be prosecuted on an individual basis, taking into account the suspect’s background, the nature of the threat, what happened as a result and so on. But the maximum penalty for a juvenile who commits a second-degree felony is to be held in a detention center until the juvenile turns 21.

For adults – that would include students already 18 years old or those 14 and older who are bound over to the adult system – the maximum punishment for a second-degree felony is eight years in prison.

There’s no way to make a blanket statement about the typical punishment for a school threat, said Julie Wilson, chief assistant prosecutor and spokeswoman for the Hamilton County Prosecutor’s Office.

“But I can tell you,” she said, “we take these things very seriously. We always have.”

In one of the Withrow 911 calls, a girl says her teacher is harassing her. “He touched me in my area,” she says, to a chorus of laughter in the background.

“Are you playing on the phone?” the operator asks.

That’s part of the problem, said Cincinnati Police Department Lt. Steve Saunders: Some students think this is a joke. But police have a duty to respond swiftly, he said. That means guns out, ready to face whatever comes.

“It’s not a game,” Saunders said. “You’re creating a huge risk to students, staff, parents – anybody who might be at that school."

Enquirer reporter Cameron Knight contributed to this story.