At 10:22 a.m. Wednesday the Decatur police dispatch received a call on the non-emergency line from a male saying, “”I’m going to blow up the school.” The caller promptly hung up without mentioning a specific school. A communications officer attempted a return call and received no answer.
According to spokesperson Lt. Jennifer Ross, after the call each of City Schools Decatur’s nine campuses and several private schools in the city were checked for suspicious activity with nothing found. The investigation, she said, has been turned over to the Criminal Investigations Division.
This was the second school-related incident this week within the city. On Monday a small caliber bullet was found inside the Decatur High arena. After a lengthy search school administrators found no weapon and the bullet was turned over to police.
In an interview Wednesday evening with the AJC, Superintendent David Dude said he was “confident” the two incidents are unrelated.
“During my time in [school] administration,” he said, “I’ve seen in increase in the number of false threats nationwide, many of them coming from high school students. You can’t evacuate every time you get a threat because that would encourage these kind of false reports.”
Dude has been on the job only five weeks, coming to Decatur from the Iowa City Community School District where he was Chief Operating Officer.
“In Iowa we even started getting these threats on Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “The thing is, sometimes these threats don’t even come from your community or even your state.”
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