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Two lake-area schools receive bomb threats
By Britt Berry, LAKE NORMAN TIMES
Schools usually want students to be in class during the school day, but students were being turned away at the gates of
Lake Norman High School on Thursday, Oct. 19.
Students and teachers coming in late for the school day, or returning from appointments, were locked out of the school
around 10 a.m. during the school's second bomb threat in a week and the seventh at an Iredell-Statesville Schools facility
this year.
"At this time, we don't believe the intention of the threat was to detonate a bomb," Iredell-Statesville Schools
spokesperson Dawn Creason said. "However, we do have to take every threat seriously. We can't gamble with the safety
of our students."
For some lake area parents, sending their children to school lately may seem like a crap shoot, as bomb threats have been
made at Statesville Middle School on Sept. 25, Union Grove Elementary on Oct. 3, North Iredell High School on Oct. 9 and 12,
Lake Norman High School on Oct. 16 and 19, and Lakeshore Middle School (and because of its proximity Lakeshore Elementary)
on Oct. 17.
Safety concerns also arose when custodian James Stewart Jr., 49, of Statesville, brought a gun onto Lake Norman High School
property at night.
Creason says that the culprits have been caught in most of the previous bomb threats, and there are suspects in the most
recent Lakeshore Middle and Lake Norman High School threats.
"The culprits are unrelated, at least in the sense that it's not the same person," Creason explains. "Once
students are caught making a bomb threat, the punishment is an automatic 365-day suspension. These kids are basically throwing
away two years of academic progress."
Creason says the bomb threats are likely copycats, and are restless students' way of acting out.
"Statistically, most bomb threats occur between the Easter Break and the end of the school year," Creason says.
"It's coming up on Thanksgiving and Christmas break now and exams are looming. The kids just kind of get nuts. They're
ready to be out of school."
Ironically, today's students, so savvy with technology and electronics, have gone back to the old way of doing things
with the recent threats, as all have been written on both the girls' and boys' bathroom walls. The Oct. 16 bomb threat at
Lake Norman High School was found written on a stall when maintenance workers went to paint the bathroom.
Creason says the writing was covered in dust and probably very old, but nonetheless, the school had to take precautions.
"Because home phones and even cell phones can be traced so easily, the students are resorting to writing out the
threats," Creason says, "And the bathroom is the most secluded place for them to do that. The once-popular method
of using a pay phones isn't really feasible because there aren't as many pay phones in schools or anywhere else for that matter
anymore."
Creason says that the bathrooms have cameras outside of them, and faculty and staff are closely monitoring who's going
to the bathroom and when. It many seem a little Big Brother, but Creason says narrowing down a window of time and knowing
who was in the restroom is crucial for determining suspects and halting the interruptions.
"We now have the custodians check the restrooms for writing in the mornings and in the afternoons," she says.
"That way, we have an idea of what's new and what's not and when it was probably written there."
Besides being proactive with the restroom graffiti, Creason says that I-SS is utilizing the Iredell County Sheriff's Department's
Crimestoppers tip line to catch the guilty parties.
"There's a $500 award for information that leads to an arrest," she says. "For a 14- or 15-year-old child,
that's a big incentive. Even for adults, that's a lot of money. We're hoping the reward is enough motivation for students
to tell what they know."
Lake Norman High School English teacher Victoria Schmidt, who was locked out during the Oct. 19 threat, says that I-SS
is doing a good job keeping the staff and faculty informed, but that the bomb threats are a huge interruption during the school
day.
"When the threats happen sometimes my students are out of class for two hours," she says. "I ask them to
take their books with them, but there's no way they can concentrate with everything going on. It's a recess for some students,
and after the students are back in the classroom it seems like they just can't get back on task. It's a wasted day."
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