With a new academic year underway, schools across the U.S. are facing twin threats: the very real prospect of gun violence , as evidenced by the recent tragedy in Georgia , and a rising wave of hoax threats .
In the wake of the Apalachee High shooting , FBI Houston officials said they had gotten more hoax school threats in the following three weeks than in the previous three years. A Missouri hotline has already gotten 301 potential school threats, nearing the total of the entire previous academic year. One Florida sheriff said 54 threats came through a state tip line on a single night this semester.
Lodi, California, has experienced threats both real and imagined since, to frightening results. On September 16, Lodi police arrested a 15-year in connection to threats against an unnamed local school, part of a wave of similar arrests around the Central Valley.
Two days later, an alarm tripped at Lodi High School, sending the campus into a full lockdown, prompting community members to panic . Lodi worried disaster had finally struck them too.