Atlanta (CNN) — A week after a 14-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle killed two fellow students and two teachers at a high school in Winder, Georgia, cell phones started buzzing about 50 miles away.
An automated call, then a text from Atlanta Public Schools pinged on the evening of Wednesday, September 11, in the pockets and purses of parents and guardians of the district’s 50,000 students:
Soon, text chains among the region’s parents began lighting up, too.
But instead of coordinating youth football practice carpools or sharing gripes over the latest math strategies, the threads were alive for the next 24 or so hours with the frantic risk-reward calculus so well known to American parents in the modern age of campus shootings :
Is it safe to send my kids to school tomorrow?
The mass attack at Winder’s Apalachee High School was at least the year’s 45th school shooting in America. And in the two days that followed, Georgia charged two dozen youths with making threats to schools and put them in youth detention centers, authorities told CNN.