You guys, I have a landline. And it rang.
I was darting between tasks, my mind occupied, my hands filled, when I answered the phone, not bothering to check the caller ID. There was the pause indicative of a pre-recorded message, then the voice of the principal of my daughter’s school. A threat had been reported. The police and the parents of the student involved had been notified. There was no need for concern.
Concern, however, was exactly what I felt. I had questions. And anxiety. Tempered, to be sure; I trust the principal and am confident that if there were reason to be alarmed he would have communicated as much. But when a parent, when this parent, hears of a threat at an elementary school the first reaction looks a lot like concern. In spite of my will to remain rational, my mind wandered to Sandy Hook. To Virginia Tech. To Columbine. Too much has happened for our collective conscious to travel anywhere other than the violence that fills our news feeds.
The altercation at my daughter’s school was a playground spat between kids. There was a threat. It was heard and reported, and according to the Iowa City School District policy at the time, the mandated next step was to inform the public.
There were so many notifications, it was beginning to feel like the boy who cried wolf.
This effort to remain transparent was a direct result of an alleged threat made at West High School on Oct. 9. Because the threat was made on social media, where users’ identities are often difficult to verify, the police department and district staff could not substantiate that a threat had indeed been made. This equivocation resulted in only a partial following of the district-wide threat protocol and a breakdown in communication between school administrators, parents, police and the broader community.
A timely ICCSD Board meeting on Oct. 13 offered the district a chance to revisit and revise the protocol. Superintendent Steve Murley raised the idea of reporting all threats, substantiated or unsubstantiated, to law enforcement so that administration could work alongside police to determine the appropriate response. Murley noted that through social media students are able to communicate with each other and with their parents at a speed the district was unable to match. He asked the board to consider a system similar to the University of Iowa’s Hawk Alert that would immediately notify the community of threats. A motion was made to direct all staff to immediately report any and all threats, substantiated or unsubstantiated, to law enforcement and to the entire parent community at the school where the threat had occurred.
This is about the time my landline rang.
And it rang the next day, too. Then there were emails, each reminding me that there was no reason for concern.
What happened is that every threat, substantiated or not, from kindergartener to high school student, was reported and communicated. In the first week of the updated policy, 28 threats in 15 district buildings were reported, the majority of which came from elementary schools.
Reactions to the increased communication varied. After school on the playground, I heard parents comment that there were so many notifications, it was beginning to feel like the boy who cried wolf. Others worried about burying law enforcement in paperwork when there are more urgent community needs. One parent had received a call from the principal because her son was overheard talking about what constitutes a threat, which was enough to warrant parent and law enforcement notification. But mostly, parents talked about the unease they felt, that moment when their hearts started beating just a little faster, when they heard of a threat reported at their kid’s school.
The policy was not achieving the results it had intended to achieve. Instead of clear communication, the new threat policy was eliciting anxiety. The policy needed to be fine-tuned. The Oct. 20 board meeting provided a chance for the district to parse out what constitutes a major versus a minor threat, and when or if these threats require communication with parents and police.
The following morning, on Oct. 21, district parents received an email from Murley acknowledging the learning curve of the past few weeks and apologizing for any increased anxiety that may have resulted from the policy flux. Murley’s email noted that immediate threats (those putting at risk the safety of the school as a whole or to a substantial number of students) should be communicated to school administration and law enforcement. However, non-immediate threats should be reported to school administrators, who would work together to determine when and if law enforcement and parent communication would be necessary.
Properly addressing threats in schools is a complex and highly emotional subject. It is also, unfortunately, a necessary conversation fraught with controversy and diverse opinions. I don’t envy the work of the board or the district, but as a parent with a kid in the game, I appreciate the effort they have made to remain as transparent as possible in respect to this particular issue (a posture the district and the board hasn’t always held). I am okay with policies changing, as long as the changes being made support the district’s goal of keeping our kids safe and providing the best education possible.
When we make the process of crafting the policies that shape our schools transparent, we are bound to see more than we are comfortable seeing. Transparency can be clarifying: it can also reveal torn seams and jagged edges.
Over the course of October and November, the ICCSD Threat Policy underwent a transformation. As often happens in policy revision, it took a few swings of the pendulum for the protocol to land somewhere in the middle of increased communication and unnecessary fear mongering. When it comes to the security of our schools, the reality is that we may have to trade, at least in part, our own comfort levels for increased safety measures.
And, let’s not forget, that crafting the best policy is still only half of the issue. The other half is what happens when said policy is put into action.
On Halloween, my kids and I were ushered from the playground into the office at Longfellow because a community member had reported a possible robbery near the school (it was not a robbery, it was a highly irresponsible Halloween prank at a home adjacent to the school). As we stood, quiet and anxious, the office door closed, police officers in the halls, my hand protectively over my daughter’s racing heart, one little boy asked aloud, “Are we on lockdown?”
Our kids know. They know that schools are not always safe places. They know what lockdown means.
I am a graduate of the ICCSD, so I can say with confidence that the schools my children are attending are not the same schools I attended years ago. Everything, from technology to testing, looks different. I didn’t worry about violence in my school. I never had to ask if we were on lockdown.
Change, though often hard, though sometimes scary, is okay. Taking a few steps back in order to correctly navigate the path ahead can be a helpful course of action. I would like to see us be a community and a school district that can acknowledge and learn from our collective mistakes. Allowing the pendulum to swing isn’t the disaster some make it out to be.
We teach our kids to take risks and to learn from their mistakes. Let’s do the same. This is a conversations I want to have with my friends and neighbors. Preferably, on my landline.
Nina Lohman Cilek lives in Iowa City and uses outdated technology on a daily basis. This article originally appeared in Little Village issue 189.
