On the monthly day when the Miami-Dade County School Board approves disciplinary measures for students who commit severe infractions, the superintendent used the occasion to talk about the insidious problem of hoax threats being made against schools.
The message is one we’ve heard before but worth repeating: school threats are not funny, they are not jokes, they are felonies. School districts all over the country are being targeted by them and the threats are coming from everywhere.
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A case in point happened on Monday. There was a bomb threat at Horace Mann Middle School, a code red situation. Wednesday, the FBI told Miami-Dade Schools Police the threat came from another state. They arrested a 20-year-old man in Texas and charged him with that crime.
“There appears to be a pattern, right around the holiday season, I do not know why, there are patterns of escalation as it refers to these threats,” said Miami-Dade Schools Superintendent Dr. Jose Dotres.
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Nine days ago, a hoax threat at Hialeah Senior High School caused a massive disruption, and police have not yet arrested anyone for that incident.
“It’s not only the school, it’s a disruption to a community, it creates a fear factor and it’s just completely unacceptable,” Dotres said.
School boards have been fighting this problem of hoax threats for years, and the Florida legislature has demanded the toughest consequences for students who commit crimes at school.
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“So the state has made it pretty much a zero-tolerance state in which many of these actions that students will commit require an expulsion from the school,” said school board member Roberto Alonso.
“Beyond the arrest, there’s an automatic expulsion from the school district, and law enforcement takes it from there,” Dotres added.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools has made a variety of efforts, including producing videos and marketing campaigns to get the word out to students and parents that threats on schools will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
“Although we have to remind our students all the time of how important it is that threats are no joke, I also want to instill in everybody that sometimes these threats are not local and they’re not from our own students,” Dotres said.
An example, of course, is the suspect just arrested in Texas. That investigation is still going on because, according to MDCPS officials, authorities are looking to see if that man is part of a group that makes random threats against schools nationwide.
Locally, parents and students should know that if a student brings a weapon to school or threatens a school, it’s an automatic expulsion from Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
