WASHINGTON: The emails arrived overnight Monday into Tuesday. They threatened the safety of hundreds of thousands of students in the nation’s two largest school districts, promising that a violent plan already had been set in motion and raising the specter of guns and bombs inside numerous classrooms.
New York City officials opted to open their public schools on time Tuesday, calling the message an amateurish hoax imitating a popular television series.
But across the country in
Los Angeles, Superintendent Ramon Cortines took a different tack, closing every school in his sprawling district in a move that disrupted the daily lives of more than 640,000 students and their families.
Maybe the threat wasn’t real. But maybe it was, Cortines said he had no choice but to be cautious.
To
Los Angeles officials, the risk of inaction was too great. The district announced shortly before 7 a.m. that classes would be canceled, and officials pleaded with employers to give parents the flexibility to take care of their children.(Washington Post)