At South High, when school officials discovered a young man had emailed other students graphic, threatening song lyrics about a school shooting, Anchorage School District and the Anchorage Police Department responded swiftly. The student was suspended, recommended for expulsion, criminally charged, and his home was searched by police, who determined he didn't have plans or the weapons to make good on his threats. Parents were notified of the incident shortly after, in a very general way, by robo-call.
What happened after that was a far greater distraction than the incident itself. There was an information vacuum that soon filled with rumors -- many disseminated electronically by students -- about bombs in lockers, lists of targets, accomplices. In an era of lightning-fast technology (that students are especially good at using), the Anchorage School District couldn't keep up. It lost control of its own story. In the absence of real facts, student gossip became parent gossip, hysterical emails (lyrics attached) circulated among parents, half-truths traveled on Facebook and via text message. Then talk radio took it up, tying in politics, stoking the drama.
By Wednesday, the anniversary of the Columbine school shooting and the date mentioned in the lyrics, 400 students stayed home from school. Making everything worse, the lyric writer began posting comments on the Daily News web site, adding fuel to the idea that he was dangerous and unsupervised. APD officers, working with his parents, later figured out he'd been on an old computer without their knowledge. Yet another example of kids with technology outpacing adults.
On Friday, the District held a parent meeting at South to try to get things straightened out. The auditorium filled up fast with a few hundred parents and students. Superintendent Carol Comeau was there, along with South High Principal Kersten Johnson-Struempler, APD Chief Mark Mew and several APD officers who work with the school and helped to investigate the case.
Comeau explained to the crowd that the district was obligated by law to protect the privacy of the lyric-writer, even though most everybody knew who he was. She wouldn't be able to go into detail about his situation. Johnson-Struempler assured parents that despite the fear the incident created "on an emotional level," in reality the school was safe. Prom, which is coming up, would have several layers of security. The boy had mentioned doing harm at an assembly in his lyrics, but there was no indication that anything was going to happen at future assemblies.
Then they opened it up for questions. Right away things got hot. A man lectured Comeau about things he'd heard on talk radio, criticizing the district's lack of communication with parents. A woman related to one of the three boys named in the poem, said that the lyric-writer had been threatening other students for months.
"Why wasn't anything done!" she said.
Johnson-Struempler said that some information had come out after the fact about his threats, but students had to tell administrators about bullying for there to be consequences.
Another parent demanded every student going to the prom be screened with a metal detecting wand. Other parents concurred. Would there be increased security at the school until the end of May, another parent wanted to know.
"You're not going to have the school surrounded? How are you going to stop that boy from coming on the property?"
Mew stepped in. As far as he was concerned, the criminal investigation went well. The boy's parents cooperated and let APD do a search of the house. (There wasn't enough evidence to get a search warrant.) APD was satisfied the student didn't plan to make good on his threats. There were no weapons. The charges against him, the most serious a felony for terroristic threatening, wouldn't be simple to prove.
"This is not a clear-cut case," Mew said.
The criminal investigation was under control, he said.
"What didn't get addressed as well is our ability to address your anxiety and fears," he said.
A student took the mic and said that even though everybody in school was talking about it, teachers tried to squelch the discussion.
"We have a right to know!" he said.
People clapped.
Teachers were briefed on what happened, Johnson-Struempler said. But it wasn't clear whether they were told to explicitly talk about it with their students.
The issue is complicated because of student confidentiality, but as far as I could tell not giving students more information was likely one of the things that led to all the rumors. Maybe teachers couldn't give details about what happened, but they might have been able to say what didn't happen, especially if they were clued-in to what students were saying online and elsewhere.
Then Johnson-Struempler said there were plans to involve the students in discussions about bullying.
A student and a parent told the crowd that the lyric-writing boy had been a victim of bullying himself.
"He was harassed every single day," the parent said.
The student said that he was her friend. She had been to camp with him.
"He is not a crazy kid," she said.
One parent said that his son had trouble sleeping after Wednesday. Another parent said that she suspected some students took advantage of the situation to skip school. It was 4/20, a significant day in pot-smoking culture, something some students certainly noticed.
"You might want to look that up," she said
Another parent questioned why one kid's misbehavior would send everybody into such a fearful place.
"We don't have all the facts," she said.
Some people clapped. Others mumbled.
Comeau said the district took responsibility for the mistakes in communicating with parents.
"We will think about this and review this and think about what we could have said and done differently," Comeau told the crowd.
No one expected rumors to travel so fast, she said. But in this age, when students' worlds are steeped in technology, those expectations will have to change. Parents, teachers and the District can't afford not to pay attention to how students communicate.
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