Further Details on Yesterday's Events

Further Details on Yesterday's Events
Posted on 11/17/2015
Message from the Cambridge Public Schools:

Thank you to all who shared your questions and concerns about yesterday’s bomb threat against Cambridge schools. We hope the following information will prove helpful to the members of our community.

Communicating about threats to student safety involves coordination with public safety agencies, and emergency procedures may cause alarm even when they are designed to keep people safe. We regret that aspects of our efforts at transparency left families feeling uneasy about whether their children were safe at school.

Some have expressed frustration with the timing of our announcements, and so we would like to provide a better picture of the timeline. CPS received notification of the threat at 6:01AM, triggering the immediate inspection of all of our school buildings by our security personnel. Please keep in mind that staff have already begun arriving at many of our buildings by six. Before 7AM, buses begin their routes and children begin arriving at some programs to have their breakfast. This means that by 6:30AM, we already had staff, families, students on buses, and unaccompanied students on their way to school. To announce the threat at that time would have caused unnecessary panic and confusion, as well as potential safety issues for children in transit.

As the threat assessment continued and found no evidence that would have triggered immediate evacuation, we were able to begin coordinated planning for public communication by all involved agencies. Please understand that if there had been any evidence of anything unusual, schools would have been evacuated and families would have been notified immediately.

There are important reasons that a threat assessment is part of our emergency protocol, even though it might add time to the process. Over-reacting to a hoax would encourage future hoaxes, empowering those who are determined to disrupt daily life in our community. Some have asked why Harvard University closed its buildings, but we did not. While we can’t speak for Harvard, we do want to point out that evacuating adults and college students from a building is a far simpler process than evacuating students as young as preschool age.

We apologize if our efforts at transparency gave families the impression that greater alarm was warranted by yesterday’s events. The unsettling reality is that even when police find nothing out of the ordinary, any threat remains undetermined until its source can be found. In the case of an anonymous online posting, this phase of the investigation will take time.

We will learn from this experience as we continue to strive to provide transparency and information that families can use to understand safety and security issues. Thank you to all who expressed their thanks, as well as those who raised important questions and concerns.

Finally, we would like to express our sincere appreciation for the swift and skillful response of local public safety officials, including the Cambridge Police Department. All relevant agencies stayed in close communication throughout what turned out to be a gut-wrenching day for us all.
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