Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
In my first nearly three years working for The Record-Times, I rushed to a local, quiet, rural school exactly zero times to cover breaking news of threats, violence and other issues plaguing other schools and communities around the country.
But in the past month, it’s happened on two different Wednesdays; once in April for a bomb threat emailed to Davenport superintendent Chad Prewitt and dozens of other supers around the state, and once last week for a so-called “jokester” who dialed 911 and told coordinator Brad Sweet he was going to go to the school with an AK-47.
Both instances were deemed to be hoaxes rather quickly. But both required local effort, resources and great stress to be exhausted from district staff, law enforcement, parents, students and community members.
So to whoever has found it humorous to create such a strain on the Davenport community and dozens of others around the state and country, I offer a simple tip: Get a life.
You clearly have plenty of time on your hands to come up with such harebrained and foolhardy schemes, so here are a few more tips if “get a life” doesn’t quite compute.
Try getting a job. Making money to be able to go buy things…whatever you want!...is a great way to spend your time.
Go outside. Start a real hobby, like bike riding, hiking, fishing, you name it.
Go socialize with real people…not fake TikTok or Internet personalities that perpetuate the idea of such hoaxes being somehow clever.
Better yet: Prepare to hire a good lawyer. Because if you’re caught, you’re facing some good hard time behind bars…and the authorities are looking for you.
The time exhausted on these hoaxes was, at best, inconvenient. And at worst, it created a large amount of stress and took important community figures away from other duties.
When the bomb threat happened, it took military personnel from Fairchild Air Force Base to clear the schools and approve that they were safe. An important and necessary measure, to be certain, but ridiculous that it came to that because of some clowns with a fake email address.
And think of the stress it puts on students, many of whom are dealing with mental health issues at a time that mental health strain is on young people more than ever in recorded history.
A 2021 study found that 29% of students experienced poor mental health and 22% considered committing suicide.
There are many factors of this, of course: The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, harmful impacts of social media, intense peer pressures, discrimination and more.
But going to school wondering if you’ll have to be evacuated because of the threat of violence at a time in this country where violence happens regularly in so-called safe places like schools, grocery stores, concert halls and the like…that certainly doesn’t help ease the mind.
And these students are in school to learn, and that is disrupted by these evacuations, taking teachers from their roles as educators to safety overseers.
So I’ll repeat: to those making these fake threats, and to those considering doing it in the future. Take a step back. Take a deep breath. And again: Get a life.
— Drew Lawson is the managing editor of the Lincoln County Record-Times. Email him at drew@cheneyfreepress.com.
Drew Lawson is the editor of the Davenport Times. He is a graduate of Eastern Washington University.
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