Sean C. Morgan
The Sweet Home Police Department and Sweet Home School District are taking extra precautions Thursday following a wave of reported school shooting threats spread around the state via social media to the Sweet Home area Wednesday.
“Oregon police agencies began tracking potential threats earlier this week after another rural school district learned via social media sources of rumored threats to their school district,” said Sweet Home Police Chief Bob Burford Wednesday evening in a release on the Sweet Home Police Department’s Facebook page. “Those rumors indicated a possible shooting could occur on Friday. The basis of the rumors were tied to the end of the ‘Mayan Calendar.’ From there the social media rumors began to spread to multiple other Oregon communities spread across the state.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with our school, fortunately,” said Sweet Home High School Principal Keith Winslow. “It sounds like it’s going across the country, really. Who knows where it originated? We spent much of the day looking into the rumors. Students kept coming to us all day long.”
Wednesday, Sweet Home School District officials contacted the Sweet Home Police Department after the Facebook and Twitter postings apparently reached the area, Burford said. “District officials contacted students involved with the postings and learned that they were repeating rumors from social media posted from other areas outside of our community. The only change to the Sweet Home postings was the date had moved up to Thursday, since no school is in session for Friday.”
“We’re aware of it across the state and into other states,” Burford said. “It certainly didn’t start in Sweet Home.”
The posts simply identify the target of the shooting as “the school,” he said. Most of the posts are simply repeats of the same posts.
“Law enforcement has not been able to track down any specific threat point,” he said. “If there was one, it started at a district in another community.”
Sweet Home Police will continue to work with School District, Burford said. “We will have a presence in and around Sweet Home schools on Thursday.”
Winslow said additional safeguards have been implemented.
Among them, “we reviewed our lockdown procedure. We have extra two-way radios.”
As a precaution, Sweet Home police will have an extra presence around the schools Thursday, Burford said, and the police have contingency plans in place.
School officials talked to the students about the threats Wednesday, and the students were quickly texting and calling their parents about it, Winslow said, and the office fielded calls about it.
“There’ll be some parents will keep their kids home, and we understand that,” Winslow said.
Updates, if necessary, will appear on the Sweet Home Police Department’s Facebook page and on The New Era website.