Local school and law officials prep after L.A. threat

All schools in the vast Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, have been ordered closed due to an electronic threat Tuesday.

Officials in the city have been accused of over-reacting by deciding to close every school in the district on Tuesday, displacing 643,000 students and their parents in the process.

The daylong shutdown kept some 640,000 students out of classes and cost the district some $29 million in state funding, officials said.

The police chief says the city takes threats against its schools seriously given the recent attack in San Bernardino and the frequency of school shootings. But, as a parent and as a mayor, certainly, I am here to support this school district as it seeks our help to ensure that we can look at each one of these campuses and make sure that they are safe for all of our children.

With notable examples in Russia, Pakistan and across the Horn of Africa, not only do terrorists target schools because they allow the depraved to strike at the most defenseless among us, but also because they wish to uproot fundamental Western values.

GWEN IFILL: Meanwhile, officials in New York City said they received a similar, if not the same, message.

Beck revealed few details because of the ongoing investigation, but said that the threat came via email and threatened violence to students and campuses via a bomb and “attack with assault rifle and machine pistols”.

Describing the threat, he said: “In reviewing it, the instigator of the threat may be a Homeland fan” he said. Police in Oakland and San Jose had no plans to make any changes to patrols, officials said. Then there’s the matter of getting students to and from school as efficiently as possible.

School district Superintendent Ramon Cortines said the closure was ordered out of an “abundance of caution”.

“Earlier this morning, we did receive an electronic threat that mentioned the safety of our schools”, school police Chief Steve Zipperman said.

A Los Angeles Unified School District bus driver walks past parked vehicles at a bus garage in Gardena, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2015.

The hyperbolic reaction that school officials had to this hoax, although in the interest of student and faculty safety, does raise some concerns over the way we react to threats in this country.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said that he was “absolutely convinced” there was no danger to schoolchildren in NY.

“It is very easy in hindsight to criticize a decision based on results that the decider could never have known”, Beck said at a news conference.

“I know the kids are anxious”, she said. There are 336 schools in the Clark County School District, but they are spaced out over an incredibly large area – 7,900 square miles. She’s concerned about her daughter feeling safe in class.

He says the schools commonly get threats, but called this one rare.

More than 2,700 officers were involved in walk-throughs at more than 1,500 school sites in searches for explosives or weapons, Los Angeles school district police Chief Steven Zipperman.