Online threats of violence plague Sacramento-area schools. What districts are telling parents

Students and staff at a Sacramento-area high school were ordered to shelter in place on Friday and two other students in the region were arrested this week as police and school district officials grappled with a nationwide wave of social media threats of campus violence.

The Natomas Unified School District issued the order to restrict access at Inderkum High School from mid-morning until about 1 p.m., as law enforcement agencies investigated the threat, district spokeswoman Deidre Powell said.

Authorities said the threats may have originated in Tennessee on the platform Snapchat and have plagued school districts across the nation as social media users have reposted them, adding the names of local schools in a flood of activity. Parents took to social media to share threats of violence targeting other schools across the capital region and elsewhere while districts sent notices to parents to inform them and allay fears of a possible incident.

"This is actually part of a trend that's been going around social media nationwide," said Sacramento County Sheriff's Office spokesman Sgt. Amar Gandhi. "Regionally, it seems to have started in Placer County ... and now seeped more into Sacramento County, and I would expect it to continue."

The postings come on the heels of a deadly school shooting in Georgia on Sept. 4, and bomb threats this week that triggered school cancellations for two days in Springfield, Ohio. The latter threats were targeted in the wake of Tuesday's presidential debate in which former President Donald Trump claimed, without evidence, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating pets.

The social media threats have so far not been found to be credible, multiple law enforcement agencies, including the Sheriff's Office, said.

Even so, threats against schools and staff have resulted in the arrests of two teens in separate incidents.

In one, a 13-year-old was arrested in Roseville after police said they came across threatening posts while investigating a separate instance of menacing verbal language.

In another, a 16-year-old student at Del Oro High School in Loomis was arrested for making a threat toward a campus staffer, said Placer County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Elise Soviar. But she said that the teen, who was arrested Thursday on suspicion of making a criminal threat, was not part of the wave of social media activity targeting schools.

"It was a specific threat to a staff member, not made on social media," she said.

Numerous schools targeted

So far the social media threats — most of them crudely replicated from prior postings with the name of a new school added on — have targeted four schools in the San Juan Unified School District, one in Placer Union High School District and an undisclosed number in Natomas Unified and Sacramento City Unified school districts, according to officials.

"There are so many different versions at this point — each listing and tagging different schools across the region," said Raj Rai, a spokeswoman for San Juan Unified. "Obviously, this has caused some disruptions and concerns within our school communities."

In that district — spread across the capital's eastern suburbs — the messages targeted Del Campo, Mesa Verde and Rio Americano high schools, as well as Andrew Carnegie Middle School, Rai said. As in other districts, many of the postings appeared to have been passed on by students and others, leading officials to ask parents to monitor students' smartphone usage.

In SCUSD, threats were received but found to be not credible, said spokeswoman Nicole Kangas. She did not say how many threats were received or which schools were targeted, though parents said on social media that John F. Kennedy and Hiram Johnson high schools were among those named. The school district notified parents about the postings this week, she said.

All of the school districts contacted by The Sacramento Bee said they had sent messages to parents about the threats.

"We are aware of a nationwide social media trend referencing potential violence at schools that has become a local concern for schools in the Sacramento region, including Elk Grove Unified," began one such letter from the Elk Grove Unified School District, Northern California's largest district. "EGUSD has alerted our Safety and Security team, as well as local law enforcement, who are investigating the source of the threats."

Parents and students online said Valley High in south Sacramento was among the Elk Grove Unified schools mentioned in posts.

Like other districts, Elk Grove officials said that local law enforcement has determined the threats were not credible, and warned students that threats against a school would be taken seriously.

Sacramento police, meanwhile, said they investigated the threat at Inderkum High School and found it to be not credible as well, said Powell of the Natomas district and officials from the Police Department.

The parent company of Snapchat, which has more than 800 million users worldwide, said it was "actively looking into these reports" and would "continue to work closely with law enforcement to support their investigations."

Snap Inc. has a safety operations team that works to escalate threatening activity on the platform, including any imminent threats to life such as school shootings, bomb threats and missing persons cases, the company said.

"Protecting the safety and well-being of young people on Snapchat is a top priority," the Santa Monica-based company said in a statement. "And this type of activity has no place on Snapchat."