HAMDEN, Conn. — Hamden High School was closed for the third day in a row on Tuesday because of multiple threats directed at the school.
Now the school district, police, and the town are working on new safety measures they hope will be in place before students return to class on Wednesday.
“It’s just nerve-wracking," said Dawn Macci, a Hamden parent with a son at Hamden High.
Macci's son and his classmates have been off since last Friday. The school was shut down after a post on Snapchat began to circulate, threatening to "shoot up" the school. A similar post surfaced again on Sunday.
“It’s really hard to track down. So, its screenshots that are being shared around on Snapchat," said Mayor Lauren Garrett.
It’s not just the threats that have recently impacted the school. A stabbing between two students occurred right outside last week.
The new safety measures include an extra school resource officer, a higher police presence near the school, more cameras and metal detectors.
At first, staff will use hand-held wands and perform bag checks. School officials also want stand-alone metal detectors placed at the school’s entrance within two weeks.
For the mayor, mental health needs to also be addressed.
“If we can get the students to receive more mental health care within our schools and outside of our schools, I'm hoping that the fights will be reduced," Garrett said.
The decision to add metal detectors was hotly contested by school board members at a meeting Monday night.
Kenneth Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based national consulting firm helping schools across the country including Connecticut, said schools often put in heightened security measures – metal detectors, additional cameras – to “create the appearance of security.”
“A lot of that turns out to be security theater,” he said. “(It’s) perception, rather than actually making schools safer.”
He said the best way to stop these threats is through prevention, not reaction.
"Having school resource officers, training your staff to recognize early warning signs, having threat assessment teams,” Trump said. “And knowing what to do when a kid comes forward and tells a trusting adult that there’s a threat, a plot, or a weapon.”
These threats made to Hamden High School and other schools across the country are more popular as of late. It's a national trend, which Trump said seems to be getting worse as more people return to in-person learning.
Some threats come from within the community. But Trump said many are coming from a tactic called "swatting." That's when threats come from outside the community, like another state or country, mainly through the internet. It's meant to cause panic among that school and community. It all requires a massive police response and disrupts the school day.
"And those who make the threats fail to realize that they leave a digital footprint and law enforcement has become more adept at tracking those individuals down quickly,” he said. “And if they're school students, they're going to see suspensions and explosions and criminal prosecutions.”
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When those cases cross state lines, federal law enforcement can get involved which also means federal charges for those threats.
In Hamden, the district is still trying to figure out where these threats are coming from.
Meanwhile, parents just want to know they’re sending their kids to a safe place.
“There’s so many of us that go to work or go to school and we don’t know what’s going to happen to us," Macci said.
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