Schools, police should be applauded for threat effort
Just a year ago, school districts throughout Fayette, Greene, Westmoreland and Washington counties, as well as across the country, were struggling with disruptive school days and anxious parents as threats of violence were being made on what seemed to be a weekly basis throughout the local area.
From Connellsville to Charleroi and Waynesburg to Mount Pleasant, the last four or five years have been a trying time in our area, when it almost became commonplace to read about yet another note found or social media post made.
Thankfully, most of the threats turned out not to be credible in terms of the belief that any actions were going to be carried out, but the stunts certainly brought with them for school officials, law enforcement and families a lot of frantic moments and downright frustrations over the senseless acts. Make no mistake, however, those threats also brought with them some serious consequences. And we think that made all the difference.
In the current academic year, while we are still hearing of these same sort of “joke” threats happening in other counties across the state, they have not been happening here in our local districts, and we credit our local leaders for that.
We applaud the efforts of school and police officials who have taken the matters very seriously. It appears to us that what programs, policies and procedures were put into place in a collaborative effort sent the message loud and clear to the students and the community that there will be severe consequences for those actions. We also have to believe that parents played, and continue to play, an important role in educating their children in the home of such consequences.
The absence of such threats in our schools this year is testimony that when we get serious about zero-tolerance and start enforcing appropriate punishments for such acts, and everyone gets on the same page with that, the problems are solved, or at least become drastically lessened.
It’s a lesson to be learned in many areas of society. We need to get passed a mentality of and stop teaching our children that a person has rights that will trump the law. It doesn’t matter who they are or what their age or where they live or why they did it — when it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and it should be dealt with as such. When people, especially our youth, start embracing that thought process as a given, playing a joke like writing a bomb threat on the bathroom wall doesn’t seem nearly as funny, now does it? We wonder what else may change if we apply the same zero-tolerance way of thinking to other areas of life.
No one is above the law, and we are glad to see our local school officials and law enforcement agencies so successfully delivering that message.