2 Valley schools identify young threat suspects

MAT-SU — A 10-year-old girl is the latest to be caught in a rash of what authorities call terroriostic threats scrawled on bathroom walls of Mat-Su Borough schools.

The girl, a student at Meadow Lakes Elementary School, was suspended for allegedly writing threatening statements on a stall in a school bathroom, Alaska State Troopers report. Troopers responded to the school at about 11:30 a.m. last Friday.

The Meadow Lake incident comes on the heels of recent threats written on restroom walls at Colony High School. Troopers have charged a 14-year-old student with two counts of terrorist threatening after school officials gathered handwriting samples from all students and compared the samples to the written threats.

Erika Gray, a senior at Colony High School, said she’s glad to know the person responsible was caught, but she doesn’t agree with the way the school deceived students into giving the handwriting samples. She believes school officials possibly abused the rights of the roughly 1,200 students at the school.

Students were asked to write down a few sentences that included statements like, “I go to Colony High School,” and information about the dates of final exams, Gray said. Students finished the document with a signature. After all the documents were turned in, the students were told the writing samples were necessary to help with the investigation.

“I was pretty angry because it was so sneaky,” said Gray, adding students thought they were writing about finals. Along with disagreeing with the sneaky tactics, she says a lack of information provided to students is troubling.

“If our lives are at stake, I think they should be more honest with us,” she said.

Although some students feel their rights may have been abused, some legal professionals say that’s probably not the case.

David Blurton is a professor of justice at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Blurton said using deception to collect writing samples likely isn’t a violation of the students’ constitutional rights. When it comes to the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, the writing sample wouldn’t be considered a search, so that standard would not apply. Also, the students’ right to council does not apply because the school was simply collecting physical evidence and no one had been charged with a crime at the time.

Deena Paramo, assistant superintendent for the Mat-Su School District, said Colony High School has thousands of documents that could have been used for the sampling, but the decision was made to obtain new samples from all the students present at school.

“In speaking with the principal, narrowing the focus would have been a better way to do that,” Paramo said.

Narrowing that focus could have been accomplished by obtaining writing samples from students who were unaccounted for at the time the threatening messages were believed to be written. This could have limited the frustration many students felt when they found out for what the writing samples were used.

“It did bother some students when they found out afterwards, and rightly so,” she said.

Despite the frustration, Paramo said it is important to take the necessary steps to protect students from any threat.

Susan Pougher, a Mat-Su Borough school board member, said she couldn’t comment about whether she believes it right or wrong to deceive students in pursuit of an investigation without knowing the legality of the issue. At the same time, she is glad a suspect was identified from the effort.

“We can’t put up with threats of harm in our schools,” Pougher said.

Although investigations have led to identifying a suspect for the recent threats at Colony High School, Pougher said it’s probably not the last time the issue will come up.

“There are always going to be more situations to deal with,” she said. “I think administration is doing what it can and [is] acting appropriately. They let the public know when something happens and they’re not pushing it under the carpet.”

The exact wording of the threats haven’t been released, but Megan Peters, public information officer for the state Department of Public Safety, said all of the threats are generally similar.

“Basically, all the threats state something along the lines of, ‘There is going to be a school shooting, get out … tell the teachers or administration,’” she said.

Although the threats were made, no evidence has surfaced that would suggest any shooting was actually planned, Peters said. Even so, the messages are a serious matter because they threaten the safety of students.

“It’s just sad, because a lot of these kids don’t know what kind of consequences follow this,” she said. “These are felony charges.”

According to Alaska Statute, terroristic threatening in the second degree is a class C felony. Charges can be applied to various situations, including falsely reporting a circumstance:

• that could endanger human life,

• that causes the evacuation of a building or public mode of public transportation,

• or places a person in fear of injury.

In addition to threats at Colony High School and Meadow Lakes Elementary, Houston Middle School received a bomb threat Dec. 11, Houston police report. An investigation is underway in that incident and suspects are being questioned.

Troopers and the Mat-Su Borough School District are working to provide as much information as possible about these types of threats and the consequences of making them. Troopers plan to present information to students, and the school district is revising its student handbook to include a detailed section about threats.

Contact Chris Gillow at chris.gillow@frontiersman.com or 352-2284.