Does it sound reasonable to posit an increase of risk of death of 1 in chance in 100,000 for the 640,000 students sent home today from LA schools? That would make an expectation of more than 6 additional deaths. LA officials should have considered this.
Easy to criticize the decision when you don’t have to take responsibility for making it.
My son goes to school in Culver City, which did not keep students home today, but I don’t fault LAUSD one bit.
Seems like the New York public school officials were able to keep their heads when presented with a virtually identical threat. The panicky behavior of the LAUSD administration is not a good precedent for keeping our schools safe.
Perhaps they did jump the gun. Still, I don’t fault them for it, and if there are lessons to be learned, great. But faulting LAUSD for being “panicky” isn’t terribly helpful.
They probably saved hundreds of children’s lives…whether the threat was credible or not.
Giving them a pass is irresponsible. LAUSD just sent a clear message that a simple email is enough to throw them into chaos and disrupt the lives of millions of Angelenos. What are they going to do if they start receiving emails like that every week? Every day? What plan to they have in place to correctly evaluate the seriousness of these sorts of threats? It seems pretty clear that right now they have no plan at all, and they have not spent much time thinking seriously about school security. Today’s leadership failure does not make me feel safer about my daughter’s high school.
Type I and Type II errors. Supposed they’d ignored the threat…and then forty kids got shot to death. The very same people now sneering at the school administrators for “panicking” would be demanding their heads and probably filing civil suits against them for wrongful death by ignoring a clear and present threat.
I’d like there to be a “cover your ass” option, perhaps in the school enrollment contract, that gives administrators protection against crap like that. If the administrators are going to be damned if they do and damned if they don’t…well, I’ll take the lesser of the two damnations.
To all the parents whining, “You overreacted,” fuck you. Better kids kept at home than dead kids. It’s as if you woud prefer a stack of dead kids, to vindicate your wonderful 20-20 hindsight.
Huh?
School bus accidents. Los Angeles traffic is that bad!
There would be no dead kids. It would just be a cynical plot to take our guns away. The same lady and other actors would show up at the scene. the FBI would recycle the same crime scene photos and evidence. Never happened.
It’s a SCHOOL DISTRICT. It’s not some high-speed governmental agency with a lot of resources for assessing these kinds of things. It’s an organization headed by elected officials, and for the most part, run by educators, not administrators.
I can’t fault them for not really knowing what to do. I wouldn’t expect a bunch of elected numbskulls and a bunch of teachers to know how to handle a potential terrorist event. That’s absurd.
Then they should defer to the FBI and the police. They should ask the people actually qualified to deal with the situation, and do what they tell them.
Exactly. Is this their first BBQ? If so, they need to give it up to someone who has been to a few. Every kid who doesn’t want to take a test now has a way out. Hard to imagine schools don’t get threats like this all the time.
News reports (KNX News Radio, CBS news affiliate) say that’s exactly what happened. The decision was made in conjunction with the FBI.
If that’s the case, why is everyone talking about the LAUSD?
And the district is a police department, with its own SWAT team and everything. This isn’t a little one-building district on the prairies. This is a massive institution with more resources than the large majority of cities in the country.
Or think about it this way: if the threat was real, it meant that somone or some people wanted to murder schoolchildren. IF you know that, why would you send them off to spend the day, in the most cases, to be unsupervised by adults for a day? By most cases, I refer to the fact that normal families with kids need both parents to work full time to make ends meet.
I hate the Monday morning quarterbacks. The district had less than an hour to react to a threat to murder hundreds of children and the city has been on edge since the San Bernadino massacre… whose investigation is still underway.
Ftr threats come in all the time to school districts but this one seemed credible to them since it mentioned a lot of specifics and the IP address came from Frankfort.
In hindsight, LAUSD overreacted. But if the same threat came in to Sandy Hook and they did nothing & sent the kids to school to be killed, would everyone say they acted appropriately? Doubtful.
“In conjunction with” in the context of a few hours lead might be a bit misleading.
A couple of reports I heard noted that the New York system is run by the city so that the school administration was in direct contact with the police while the Los Angeles system is an independent entity that had to go “outside” to consult with Homeland Security.
In these cases, it is not a matter of who is getting what information, but how direct the existing lines of communication are among all the involved parties that are needed to make an informed decision in a limited amount of time.
'Cos schools in LA have a reputation for being kinda scary anyway 