School board president Steve Zimmer said: “We need the cooperation of the whole of Los Angeles today”.
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The second largest school district in the country will be back in business this morning. Los Angeles police say the 17-year-old boy who was fatally struck by a city…
The Los Angeles Times reports that officials worked through the evening to inspect more than 900 schools in the district and found them to be safe.
(AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu).
A Los Angeles Unified School District bus driver walks past parked vehicles at a bus garage in Gardena, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2015.
When parents, teachers, and children in Los Angeles and New York City woke up Tuesday morning, they were in for very different days: different from a typical school day, with anxiety and security concerns spiking thanks to school threats received Monday night, but also different from each other, as Angelenos sat tight at home, and New York children marched off to class as usual.
In LA, the threat came in the form of an email to a school board member. Districts regularly encounter the challenge of deciphering threats, complicated today by more sophisticated technology that can make them harder to trace. Cortines, citing the December 2 terrorist attack in nearby San Bernardino that left 14 people dead, said he closed Los Angeles schools “out of an abundance of caution”. “And if they come to the conclusion that they can literally mail it in, call it in and disrupt large cities, they’re going to take advantage of that”.
The schools were ordered to shut and authorities said the “rare” threat was credible, with up to 643,000 students affected as more than 1,000 schools were shut.
“I’m glad they shut it down”, said Rebecca Alvarado, who was taking her 5-year-old daughter, Sofia, to an elementary school near downtown.
‘Whether it’s criminal mischief, whether it’s somebody testing vulnerabilities of multiple cities, we still do not know enough to say definitively, ‘ he told a press conference. About 37 percent of the threats were sent electronically, and almost a third resulted in schools being evacuated.
“He said the email included all Los Angeles Unified schools and mentioned explosive devices, ‘assault rifles and machine pistols'”.
A preliminary investigation suggested the threat – and the one sent to New York City schools – was a hoax, according to a statement from Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “Los Angeles doesn’t have that same kind of experience” with antiterrorism work as New York City, Victor Asal, the chair of public administration at the State University of New York at Albany, told the Associated Press. The message reportedly read, “The students at every school in the New York City school district will be massacred, mercilessly”.
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Parents returned their children to school on Wednesday, with some expressing concern about not receiving notice about the school closures sooner.
