When Dustin Marsh told his daughter she didn’t have to go to school anymore, she gave a sigh of relief. The 11-year-old is now being homeschooled due to a string of vague, violent threats that rippled through Levy County schools last month.
She’s not the only one. Four known threats, all originating on social media within the span of a few days and all deemed non-credible, caused panic among parents. They raced to take their children out of school, some of them permanently.
The threats have cost students valuable learning time and the ability to feel safe at school, and the Levy County Sheriff’s Office (LCSO) has allocated thousands of dollars to investigate.
The threats warned of a school shooting, with one describing a three-part plan to ambush students as they exited for a fire alarm and urging the receiver to spread the message. None of the threats named a specific school. Despite the sheriff’s office’s thorough investigations and assurances that none of the threats held any credibility, they still hit a nerve.
“My daughter was scared to death,” Marsh, 35, said. “Kids are afraid to go to school.”
Marsh, whose daughter attended Williston Middle High School and noticed the threats on her friend’s Snapchat story, posted screenshots of two threats on Facebook on Sept. 17, six days after police had investigated two similar threats.
On Sept. 11, Chiefland Middle High School received calls of concerns about social media threats from a neighboring school district and, along with Chiefland Elementary School, was placed on “secure campus” status out of caution, meaning no one can enter or exit the building and students cannot leave their classrooms.
Police released both schools from secure campus status a few hours later after determining no threats were directed at any Levy County school. Later that night, police were made aware of a second threat, this one at Williston Middle High School, which claimed a school shooting would occur Sept. 12.
Police again found the threat was not credible but placed extra officers on the school’s campus.
After two additional threats surfaced on Sept. 17, Marsh said he was fed up with the disruptions and unenrolled his daughter.
“This isn’t funny. It isn’t cute,” he said. “My daughter doesn’t feel safe at that school, and I don’t feel safe with her there.”
Several other parents on Facebook said they had also taken their children out of school or were concerned for their child’s safety.
“It’s really not fair to get texts from my 11-year-old daughter on more than one day saying she is scared someone is going to shoot the school, that there has been a threat online and if I could pick her up,” said Ashley Renfroe, 32, mother to a sixth grader at Williston Middle High School and an 8-year-old at Joyce Bullock Elementary School.
Renfroe said the threats have put her and her daughter at the middle school in a difficult situation.
“I can’t honestly say that I feel safe with her being there, but she needs to go to school, so as a parent, what other choices do I have?” she said. “It’s a scary world we live in. [My children] should feel as safe at school as they do at home.”
Lt. Scott Tummond of the Levy County Sheriff’s Office said nearly a third of Williston Middle High School students didn’t attend school on Sept. 17 because of the threats.
“We’re our own worst enemy,” he said. “Three hundred students didn’t attend school that day based on what a sixth grader, an 11-year-old child, got from a Snapchat post. How is that right? When are the kids going to learn?”
Tummond said the threats and parents’ desperation to check their kids out of school caused a chaotic ripple effect.
“When you have 100, 150 parents show up all in mass … that creates a huge strain on the school system,” he said. “It disrupts every classroom under the confines of that building from sixth grade through 12th grade, and it spills into the elementary school just down the road.”
The threats in Levy County are part of what appears to be a nationwide trend. Several counties across Florida and the U.S. have reported similar situations. Some, like Volusia County, have arrested students accused of making threats.
And it’s not just the schools that are losing valuable time and resources. Tummond estimated that the LCSO has spent between $5,000 and $15,000 investigating these threats since school started on Aug. 12.
“We throw everything but the kitchen sink at things like this,” he said. “It is very taxing on the limited resources that we have here.”
Tummond said the department is caught in the middle, charged with the responsibility of investigating all threats but stretched thin by false alarms and internet hysteria that take resources from where they’re really needed.
“When you pull a resource from one place and put it to another, anything can go wrong,” he said. “I would much rather see somebody get apprehended that is breaking into a home than have to investigate an internet threat that who knows where it came from.”
Inquires made to the Chiefland and Williston schools were referred to John Lott, assistant superintendent of Levy County Schools.
He said ensuring the safety of every school takes “an incredible amount of manpower” and advised students and parents to refrain from getting and spreading information through the grapevine.
“Repeating rumors that have no factual basis makes the situation worse,” Lott said. “It’s a little bit of a double-edged sword. We want to know if there are issues, but real issues, not rumors.”
No arrests have been made at this time. In a statement posted on Facebook on Sept. 17, the LCSO said they would continue to investigate any threats and suspend students responsible for perpetuating rumors.
Police are urging parents whose child has alerted them of a potential school threat to immediately call law enforcement so they can investigate.
