New Hampshire police investigate threats that closed schools

The entire Nashua, New Hampshire Public School district was closed Monday due to threats of violence to the district’s two high schools e-mailed to a school administrator on Sunday night.

NASHUA, N.H. (AP) Police who investigated threats to hurt students and teachers at schools in the state’s second largest district concluded Monday that they weren’t credible and that schools would reopen Tuesday.

Nashua police say they are working with state and federal agencies to determine if the threat was credible.

The threat of violence is the third against a school district in the past week.

(Parent) “There are so much schools going on, I mean, sending my son to school and not having him back, it’s scary”.

“If the idea is to terrorize the school system, that would be what your definition of an act of terror would be”, Capt. David Bailey said of the threat made towards students and staff at both city high schools.

Most parents necn spoke to agreed with the superintendent’s decision to cancel school Monday. A “penalty” so “severe that none of our people would even think about it, quite frankly”, he said during a forum on security at the University of New Hampshire. The district receives threats from time to time, usually from within the 11,500-pupil student body, but few are as specific as the one received this weekend.

New Hampshire Governor Maggie Hassan provided the following statement: ‘Public safety is any government’s most important responsibility – especially at our schools – and we are closely monitoring the situation in Nashua’.

Nashua schools are scheduled to be open tomorrow and Wednesday before closing through Christmas and the New Year. “The Tyngsborough Police Department is already active in the schools and will remain so”.