Students continue chatting as the intercom comes on, announcing yet another shelter-in-place lockdown. Classmates crack jokes with one another and continue to work in peace, despite the circumstances. After a short period of uncertainty, an announcement is released regarding the cause of the lockdown. Students are relieved to hear the news: it was only a bomb threat.
On Dec. 2, a shelter-in-place was conducted during first period as police investigated the building under threat of a bomb. This was one of the multiple occurrences of such a threat to school over the past two school years.
Students have grown numb to the surprise of such threats to their lives as the idea of the bomb threat becomes more familiar to the school community. “When it happened, at first they weren’t telling us anything and me and my friends were confused and a little nervous. But when we found out it was a bomb threat, it made us relieved… it was like good news,” senior Lexie Lindauer said.
Though staff and students don’t tend to worry about the hypothetical bombings, people from outside of the community recognize the frightening nature of the threats. It seems normal from the perspective of students who face such threats on a somewhat regular basis, but parents and students from other schools haven’t grown used to it. “My mom was like ‘Oh my god are you OK?’, but I didn’t really care,” Lindauer said.
This trend of disinterest toward the threats is a result of the repetition in which the bomb threats are made and then proven to be false. Though the first bomb threat made in the previous school year was a shock, each subsequent threat has seen less intense reactions than the last. “We’ve had a lot… once we’d had enough, it just isn’t shocking,” junior Christian Van Meter said.
The community’s desensitization to the threats has set an example for new staff and students to not take the threats seriously. Students in their first year here, such as freshman Luke Parrot and sophomore Onyx Sanders, have expressed apathy and annoyance toward the threat.
Bomb threats don’t bear the same weight as other threats to the school, as students struggle to believe that there really could be a bomb in the building. Whereas an active threat in the building seems frightening, an explosion seems fantastical, as they are often portrayed in movies and television. “You hear a lot about school shootings, but there’s less precedent for school bombings,” senior Riley Sanders said.
With a change of principals, a number of racist incidents coming to light and a former student found guilty of threatening mass violence, this school has been in the news frequently. The constant buzz surrounding the school has undermined the severity of each individual incident, as incidents such as bomb threats are seen as just another reason to be on the news.
Dec. 2 was both the day of the lockdown and the day of the racist incident that motivated the Dec. 6 BSU walkout, adding to the school’s constant publicity that students have grown used to.
