LA schools closed for ‘terror threat’

The threatening email sent to the New York City school superintendent warned that every school would be attacked with pressure cooker bombs, nerve agents and machine guns. Mayor Eric Garcetti said the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that the threat wasn’t credible.

The mayor said he hopes police catch the person who made the threat.

Jennifer Agnew, whose five-year-old attends a school in Laurel Canyon, added: “I am glad to see that they are taking situations like this seriously”.

Los Angeles schools commonly get threats, but Cortines called this one rare.

The scare comes less than two weeks after a terror attack in nearby San Bernardino left 14 dead and 22 wounded. “I as superintendent am not going to take the chance with the life of a student”, Cortines told the Huffington Post. All LAUSD campuses were searchedAlong with the closures, the district said all after-school activities had been canceled. The closures led to a loss of $29 million in state funding, but State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said funds could be reimbursed.

So it is understandable that Cortines, Beck and others in Los Angeles would feel they needed to make their own decisions – and to do so quickly – rather than rely on national security officials to do an analysis before advising them what to do.

Ronna Bronstein, who has two sons in grade school, said she was trying to find out more about the incident while shielding her younger child from the news.

Mr Beck said it was “irresponsible” to criticise the decision in the aftermath of the December 2nd attack on a regional centre in San Bernardino, east of the city.

“It is very easy in hindsight to criticize a decision based on results that the decider could never have known”.

What I do know is that it doesn’t help to have New Yorkers trying to sound more intelligent than California school officials for making a decision they felt was in the best interest of the children they serve.

All Los Angeles Unified School District schools are closed on Tuesday after a threat was made against multiple schools in the district, officials said.

“We have chosen to close our schools today until we can be absolutely sure that our campuses are safe”.

“I literally woke up to the call”, parent Jim Alger told NBC Los Angeles.

CCSD officials say they have a plan in place, but just like it was in L.A. – searching every school and sending out the word to more than 320,000 students would have been a monumental job.

The threat went on to state: “We have bombs hidden in backpacks in lockers at several schools and they are strategically placed to crumble the foundations of the very buildings that monger so much hate”.

(AP Photo/Danny Moloshok). Skateboarders perform tricks at Pedlow Field Skate Park before the park opens as LAUSD schools remain closed, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2015, in Encino, Calif. All schools in the vast Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s…